POSSIBLE FILMS: SHORT WORKS BY HAL HARTLEY 1994-2004

POSSIBLE FILMS: SHORT WORKS BY HAL HARTLEY 1994-2004 (2004, USA, Hal Hartley)
They didn’t know if they were doing the right thing or not. They hoped they were. They were living second by second, with signs. They’re religious: they kind of think the world is miraculous.

If you thought AMATEUR, HENRY FOOL or BOOK OF LIFE were off the beaten movie track, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Hartley’s idiosyncratic aesthetic may in fact be most effective in these short experimental pieces, three of which also continue his exploration of spiritual themes.

The writer-director’s preoccupation with things apocalyptic led him to an investigation not only of the Branch Davidians but back to the origins of American millennial Christianity. The results found their way into SOON, an oddly fascinating contemporary opera commissioned for Austria’s Salzburg Festival, a speculative recreation of the last days of an End Times group not unlike the famous Waco cult. We see only a teasing fifteen-minute excerpt of the work’s second staging in Pasadena, the emphasis on physical movement and exceptionally strong performances.

Parker Posey has never been so gorgeous or quirky nor Hal Hartley’s eccentricity so effective as in the even odder OPERA NO. 1, an 8-minute (Wenders/Shakespeare-inspired?) mini-opera about a pair of inept angels in wedding dresses and roller skates who play matchmaker to a tormented writer and a bicycle courier who sings “I work too much / I want a boyfriend,” all staged in an abandoned theatre for an invisible audience.

Less effective – or less accessible – is THE OTHER ALSO, in which two digitally distorted human forms move in front of a window as voices speak Jesus words (in English and, apparently, in Japanese?) “But I say unto you, do not resist, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Viewers new to “personal vision” film may find these experiments intolerably strange, while hardcore gallery-goers could judge them light-weight and precious: for me, they hit the spot exactly.

SOON programme notes


Available at Videomatica