Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley
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Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

Chapter 1:  Critical Approaches
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CHAPTER 1

Critical Approaches

I don’t see the point of disguising the artifice of art.1 Making Simple Men, I came to understand I wanted to work almost exclusively towards this integration of gesture, physical activity, and dialogue.2

In his introduction to the 1988 edition of Performance Theory, Richard Schechner contended that “performance is an illusion of an illusion and, as such, might be considered more ‘truthful,’ more ‘real’ than ordinary experience”.3 Likewise, film, which taps into many of the elements of performance, might be looked upon as a similar “illusion of an illusion”. Some films attempt to cut through the illusion, David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive (2001) for instance, attacking the realist, self-evident nature of film narrative. In the same way, No Such Thing, perhaps Hartley’s most emblematic film, assaults the illusionary nature of the film text. But is “all the weight”, as Roger Ebert suggested, “in the packing materials”?4 What are “the packing materials”? Does Ebert mean to suggest that No Such Thing is too formal and lacking coherent content? Equally, the film can be looked upon as having all