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chapter, I discuss the disastrous No Such Thing, produced in conjunction with United Artists and Francis Ford Coppola, an unsuccessful mainstream flirtation. Again, this work is considered as a film that is both a continuation of previous work, exploring the fictional constructedness of performances (especially gendered ones) but displaying a greater interest in issues of postmodernism, terrorism (just pre-9/11, a reason for the film’s partial suppression), and media representations.
In the final chapter, I examine the shifting concerns in Hartley’s work since the very low-key release of No Such Thing in 2002. I chart Hartley’s withdrawal from the Indiewood sector and the popular crossover independent sector that he was a part of during the 1990s. Contemporaries like Jarmusch, Soderbergh, and Haynes have gravitated closer to the mainstream, but Hartley’s mainstream experience has forced him into a more marginal position, withdrawing from Indiewood studio-supported distribution into much greater control of his work through his company Possible Films, including the use of new digital technologies to expand his control over both the production and ownership of his work. This is the promotion of Hal Hartley as a digital auteur, an independent artist in the most romantic sense, something facilitated by digital photography, DVD, and Internet promotion. I also consider Hartley’s digital works—The Book of Life (1998), The New Math(s) (1999), The Girl from Monday, and Fay Grim—and look at the ways in which they differ from earlier works in their increasing experimentation with visual manipulation and how they have less of a focus on the performance of body and character. Works such as these demonstrate Hartley’s commitment to move away from the mainstream indie sector, even relocating to Europe in order to pursue art film production in ways that he feels unable to do while based in the United States. Finally, these films represent Hartley’s shift closer to the avant-garde art cinema he admires, an influence that has always been evident in his work, but that is now more fully realised in the digital features produced in the last decade.
The committed Hartley fan might perceive a number of gaps and absences through the text here. First, perhaps surprisingly, there is no detailed consideration of repetition as a formal system in Hartley’s work.