Hal Hartley, one of the most prolific American independent directors, has recently released a collection of films titled “Possible Films Volume 2.” Hartley’s career dates back to the 1980s, when he shot his first feature, “The Unbelievable Truth.” Since then he has directed more than 20 shorts and features. His films borrow stylistic traits from European arthouse cinema and the American avant-garde. He has also delved into playwriting with his play “Soon,” staged in Europe in 1998 and the United States in 2001 respectively, being published this year.

His new DVD is available from Microcinema International. The DVD consists of five films, which are characterized by cinematic austerity and poetic anti-representationalism. Hartley follows the political modernist dictum that it is not enough to produce for a medium but to change it as well and the result is five films that challenge film language and form. This DVD release is the occasion for an interview with Hal Hartley focused on issues of film form and film production outside the realms of the mainstream practices.

My first question deals with independence in the filmmaking production. Last year I was at a conference in Liverpool dedicated to the American Independent Cinema.  I was astonished to realise that some of the films labeled as ‘independent’ looked very Hollywood to me.  Amongst the objects discussed were films by Katherine Bigelow, Nancy Meyers and mainly films produced by Miramax. On the whole, independence was treated as a matter that had to do strictly with the financial independence from the big studios and not on any artistic basis.  Given that you are considered as an independent filmmaker what do you think about the notion of independence? Should not independent film production give a certain freedom to the filmmakers to experiment with the medium and not succumb to an imposed apparatus, or is it just a financial matter?

Hal Hartley: For me, it has always been a designation of a way of doing business rather than a way of making art. In fact, in the early nineties I was very suspicious of the way the term “independent” was used for whatever different people wanted it to mean. But at the same time I knew I aspired to make work that was well outside the mainstream of commercial entertainment, so independent business models suited my art best. They gave me more control over production and – in certain ways – over distribution.

You come from the USA but there is a European feeling in your films.

Hartley: As a young person I responded pretty strongly to the films of Wim Wenders on the one hand and Godard on the other – the New German Cinema of the 1970′s and the French New Wave of the 1960′s. And in the 1980′s – when I began making films in earnest – it was Wenders and Godard who – through their work and interviews – directed my attention to American filmmaking – in particular: Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges. So I really came to America via Europe before I ever left home.

You recently released a collection of films titled Possible Films Volume 2? As I perceive it the title Possible Films, indicates works in process. Is that right? Could you also tell us what the films are about?

No, I think these new short films are really very finished. The name of my company – Possible Films – is meant to remind me that there are different kinds of films one can make, there is not only a “good” way, or the “right” way, or the “successful” way. The world belongs to me just as much as it belongs to Quentin Tarantino or Tom Twyker. What we do with it is up to us as people.

Yet, on the other hand, I have the feeling that the films are about the impossibility of their own making and what I mean is the impossibility of closure, of a totalised narrative that does all the work for the spectator. What is the model of your ideal spectator?

That’s an interesting way to phrase it: impossibility of closure. Avoiding anticipated closure is certainly an aspect of them (in fact, in a lot of my feature films as well). But it never seems impossible. Just not desired. When I make short films I have a distinctly different agenda than when making features.  I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious but it is more like the difference between a poem and a novel – where associations of ideas and impressions are allowed to remain associations and impressions rather than points made clear and definitive. The concise impression of something difficult to say. I find my way more intuitively. To include lightness and depth, the personal and the general, the local and the global… all in a short film. Probably because in a short film the characters can remain generally sketched in. A longer story  – just by being long – contributes more psychological identification with characters.

To put this in a political context, I want to bring Brecht. Brecht favoured the working spectator rather than the passive one, who consumes narratives that do not give him/her the opportunity to become productive. I recently read a review of Godard’s latest film in the Guardian and the critic accused him of being disdainful towards his audience. Why have we reached the point that any complication of the medium is considered to be elitist?

I sometimes do think people have a decidedly consumer attitude about the arts that is fostered by the acceptance of newspapers as lifestyle guides. Have you noticed this? “It must be good and valuable, the New York Times said so.” That sort of thing.  Maybe it has always been this way. I don’t know. But I can see just by talking to people that the majority clearly believes celebrity and financial success determines relevance. And what I try to portray, for instance, in the first third of The Apologies is a recognition of this which is not resentful. The playwright – talking to another aspect of himself – acknowledges the basic consumer tendencies of our culture but pushes on anyway in a constant, moment by moment, readjustment of his creative aims in relation to what people seem to want.  This, as I see it, is simply the reality of the situation, no matter who you are or when you’re working. Godard, of course, is a tough case, but I don’t think he is disdainful of the audience. (I think it is important to keep in mind which audience one is talking about. Godard does not pretend to be addressing a mainstream audience where, on the other hand, the writer in the newspaper may have gone from a review of Godard’s latest to a review of – say – Up In The Air. His frame of reference is an issue in and of itself.) But apart from Godard – who is an exceptional case – I think the suspicion of elitism has to do with the popular death of irony which requires one to be alert and to infer. People are annoyed if they have to infer. I have always appreciated Brecht’s idea that we should try to hinder the audience’s tendency to simply identify with the characters and cause the audience to accept or reject the actions on stage in a more conscious way. Personally, I think it’s more fun. Moliere did this too. And, as far as I know, he and Brecht had different politics.

After watching the latest DVD, I had the feeling that your major thematic concern is the film medium itself. In my estimation, the thematisation and the questioning of the medium is a matter of political importance, because it indicates an understanding of it, which goes beyond the mimetic mirroring of actions. In what ways do you understand your films to be political?

In some ways it comes back to your earlier thoughts about the use of the word independent. I said for me it denoted a manner of being – in fact – a business person. The manner in which I decide to be a business person can be described as a political decision.  Just as the manner I decide to be an artist indicates a certain assumptions I have about the value of community. Someone asked me recently why I don’t move to Los Angeles and get work as a director of TV. I answered because don’t drive. I was being a wise-ass, of course, but it’s also true; on some level choosing not to be part of a car culture is the same as not wanting to make money manufacturing indifferent entertainment for a mass audience. I want a different kind, a more intimate and discursive interaction with those around me. But the film medium itself is not my primary concern. Not like with the New Wave guys, for instance. The history of cinema does not weigh upon me at all. But, when I want to express what life is like for someone like me it is impossible not to include a representation of how I think and experience the world. I am a filmmaker after all, whether I like it or not. The way I experience the world is through what I do.

Another important aspect of PF V2 is inter-mediality. Texts, theatre plays, films within the film clash with each other and create heterogeneous effects.  Is this another way of seeking the truth beyond the limits of the visible?

These films were really, actually, made out of the occurrences of day to day life. For instance, The Apologies was initiated because Ireen Kirsch asked me to direct her video audition for drama school. My own ambitions during these few years was to make films – little stories – out of the stuff of everyday life as I myself moved through it. So, Ireen brought in the Hofmannstahl. I thought to myself: what can I do with this? I read it twenty times or so and thought – because my regular day to day reality is that of a filmmaker in a certain relationship to the critical media – maybe there is a way in which this can reflect the love affair between the artist and the critic? So I worked outward from there, creating the first third of the film with Nikolai Kinski being the artist and the last third of Bettina Zimmermann being the critic. They talk to one another, in a sense, through the girl. So, inter-mediality is an interesting term you use. The girl is a medium. But generally I wanted the films – individually and, as I later began to suspect later, as a whole – to give a fairly straight forward impression of what occupies the mind and the heart of a man like me who labors at a certain type of creative work.

From my perspective, your work is very cinematic in the sense that it deserves to be shown in proper movie theatres. How do you distribute it? And to relate this to Godard, who seems to be a point of reference in your films, do you think that his polemical language against the distribution networks is still relevant? Do we still experience a colonization of taste’?

I distribute the smaller works, like PF2, by dealing directly with movie theaters. Even in the States there is a nationwide network of art-houses who pretty much all show the same things. So, I let them know the film is available. They all have budgets for local advertising and – in the bigger cities – money to bring the artist for a Q&A after the showing. In my experience, that is what really makes it worthwhile for the local art-house theater: the big crowds come when the artist is there. So, I do this. But it is very exhausting. However, it is really exciting to discuss the films locally – as it were under the radar of the instantaneous opinion making of the national press. I appreciate some of Godard’s ideas about what has been lost in terms of ideas and community by the advance of mass consumerist society. Conversation has been discredited. However, what I have just described is the opposite of corporate film distribution. Corporate distribution is aimed at the very middle of the center of the mainstream. There is little room for what Godard has always called the margin. But I always took this as a given, maybe because I am an American of a particular generation and never expected support for my art – there was never any, except commercially. I never understood the vehemence of Godard’s polemics about the “colonization of taste” as you say. The French New Wave guys – at least at the beginning – didn’t even colonize. They just burnt everything down critically and rushed in as everyone was fleeing. That seems to me the truth of culture – it’s a fight to the death.

In Accomplice the last film in the DVD collection, Godard is heard saying: ‘after all I say I am innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures. We will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show to someone—OK, you won’t get the Oscar for this, but after all why are you writing and why…? So it will be possible, I have always said that to make movies and to make images and sounds is possible one way or another’. Did you use this quote as a Manifesto that synopsises your views on the filmmaking process?

It’s not a manifesto. Less forceful than that. I think it’s almost sentimental. It is, in fact – the way he said it at the time and the way I recognize the reality of being a creative artist now – it’s just an admission of the situation as it is. Nothing to apologize for. This, I think – not apologizing – might actually be the really provocative thing for audiences who value only celebrity and financial power. But, in a sense, that’s their problem, not mine.

One of my favourite films in PF V2 is The Apologies. There is a sense of excessive theatricality in it. I found the idea of interjecting a woman rehearsing her role with another one making her love confession to someone who is not even there very challenging. It gave me the feeling that the boundaries between theatre and life are blurred.

The theatricality is important here because the menage a trois are all acting out in private. The love-like talk of the woman in the final third is really to add a sharper, more poignant edge to the thought she was invented to relate: that the artist, the audience, and the critic represent the ultimate love triangle. Each are helpless – non-existent – without the other two. I have been working on that sentence for over fifteen years, trying to make it scan best: “your (the artist’s) vanity prevents you from seeing how passive enthusiasts with a sense of entitlement (the audience) require trusted and well paid intermediaries (critics).” It’s a harsh but inclusive leveling of the playing field for all three teams. But it’s still a playing field.

My last question deals with issues of authorship.  Despite the fact that you work in a very independent way, your films have the form of unfinished material that the audience is asked to sort it out themselves.  What I mean is that I you seem to pose questions and question answers that fail to be given a reductive interpretation.

That’s just the kind of entertainment I enjoy, as you say “pose questions and question answers”. I was brought up on work like this. We’ve mentioned some of it here: Moliere, Brecht, Godard…