Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

most dramatic texts from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In place of the conventional actor, Bresson saw the “human model”: “No actors. (No directing of actors.) No parts. (No learning of parts.) No staging. But the use of working models, taken from life. BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors)”. As such, Bresson inverted the system of performance in the Stanislavskian methodology: “HUMAN MODELS: Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from the interior to the exterior.)”⁵² Although his theory is based around notions of transcendence, Bresson constructed a materialistic paradigm of performance. The use of the term “model” suggests an inert body ripe for manipulation on-screen—actors as machines—rather than the spirituality of the actor in modes of performance that effect a shift from interior to exterior where the actor “lives” a part. Bresson’s “models” do not live a part, they perform—the external realisation of performance provides a means for transcendence (“BEING instead of SEEMING”). The performance of the “model” is therefore gestural, based in the physicality of the performer, rather than in the mimicry of real affective uses of voice, word, and nonabstract gestures that pre-exist the performance of the actor.

Hartley and Bresson are undoubtedly linked by their Catholicism—in films such as Amateur, No Such Thing, and The Unbelievable Truth, where faith is a key theme—but there is also a similar concentration on gesture and the movement of the body. Bresson’s insistence on the mechanical performance of the models places an emphasis on the lack of emotional inflection in the performance of the body. This is a feature that Bresson developed through a rigorous repetition⁵³—a facet that Hartley shares. Additionally, Hartley has spoken of his admiration for Bresson and what he perceives as their shared emphasis on minimalism: