Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

The Sisters of Mercy demonstrates a major facet of Hartley’s approach to performance. Assembled from the outtakes of an earlier film (Iris, 1993), Hartley described the film as “a documentary concerning the periods between the actual takes”.⁴⁸ The film exposes the labour and activity of the performers and the process by which a performance becomes fixed in the final text. The exposition of the performer as a performer, rather than as just a character, is a concept that runs throughout Hartley’s work, from early work such as Surviving Desire (1991) to later films like No Such Thing. The performer is at the core of Hartley’s oeuvre and influences much of the stylistic systematisation of his work, where the abstract text functions to emphasise the individual units of signification within a performance. By combining different modes of performing—including alienated acting, dancing, mime, and gestural movements—the activity of the performer is made abstract, exposing the illusion behind the conventional goals of the actor. In this respect, Hartley is heavily influenced by Brecht and Godard, whose modernist projects attacked the bourgeois realist text, where performances were hidden behind the illusions of character and spontaneity.⁴⁹ As such, the term “performance” is preferred to that of “acting” in this study because it suggests a whole continuum of possible activities, of which acting is just one subset of potential signs and outcomes.

Any movement performed by the body is tangible, materially enacted by the musculature of the performing body. Movements and gestures have a relationship with the space that surrounds them that more directly “meaningful” actions, such as speech and facial contortions, do not. A materialistic theory of film, like that of Robert Bresson, posits the physicality of the actor above the affective potential of the voice: “The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders!... How many useless and encumbering words then disappear! What economy!”⁵⁰ The connotative abstraction of gestures therefore substitutes body movement for more systematised modes of communication. Bresson’s theory of cinematography (a method for “writing with images in movement and with sounds”⁵¹) favours the abstraction of movement above the mimetic processes of acting that predominate in