The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Parody, Poetry, and the Periphery: Hal Hartley’s Amateur

By Jens Nicklas

Jens Nicklas received an M.A. in German Literature from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. in German and American Literature and Film from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research interests include documentary film, performance art and popular culture. He is currently working on his dissertation in which he intends to explore the relationship between documentary film and postmodern theory.

There is a scene about halfway through Hal Hartley's poetic and intricate Amateur in which the amnesiac protagonist, Thomas (Martin Donovan), asks a schoolboy about what he's reading. The kid replies, "The Odyssey," gives Thomas a very brief synopsis of this classic story and, in turn, wants to know what reading matter Thomas himself is devoting his time to. "Chicks," he says matter-of-factly, handing the boy the porn magazine he has been carrying around all day, a temptation the boy, putting down the story of the archetypical and oft-quoted Greek myth, cannot resist.

Apart from drawing attention to the split between a canonical official and a darker underground culture - a gap that Amateur itself is in some way trying to bridge - this brief scene mirrors the film's basic strategy: to offer up something, to play on our expectations, and then to frustrate and undermine them, thereby foregrounding just how we usually depend on conventional interpretational patterns. In this case, the formula is the story-within-a-story approach (Odysseus within Amateur), the tried and tested way of filmmakers and writers alike to link their stories symbolically to that of the ur-hero of Western civilization, frequently with the intention of making a grand statement about the condition of mankind. In Amateur, however, this classical device is, quite simply, a red herring. It tells us nothing significant about either plot or characters. It does not mirror the film's action. It is not the key to understanding the whole film on a more abstract level. What it is, though, is the rejection of an exhausted vocabulary in which Odysseus always means something like "perilious journey back home," in which a question always elicits an answer (Amateur is full of "non-answers"), and the ring of a bell always triggers salivation.

Far from being gratuitous play, or postmodern pastiche, Amateur's awareness of codes stresses contradiction and difference (between being and appearance, for example). This is not only visible in its (non-)use of the mythical Odysseus story, but even more importantly in the depiction of its characters. Here, too, no-one is what they seem to be, or indeed what they would be expected to be; in other words, everyone is someone else. Sofia (Elina Löwensohn), supposedly "the most notorious porno actress in the world," is icy and detached, Thomas is not the mean-spirited and cold-blooded pimp he is made out to be, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) is what must be the most brilliant oxymoron in film history, a nymphomaniac nun (and she's not even that!), and Edward (Damian Young) is certainly not your average accountant. Hartley's embrace of ambiguity and contradiction even extends to minor characters like the compassionate and motherly police officer (Pamela Steward), the editor of dirty magazines (David Greenspan) whose real vocation is "defamatory journalism," and the two hitmen and brutal torturers who both hold business degrees (although this last coupling of presumably irreconcilable roles might today, metaphorically at least, be the most recognizable one). After all, "amateur" is itself an ambiguous term, meaning both "unprofessional" and, etymologically, "the one who loves:" two attributes that also frame and define the film's characters.

By defying our expectations and mapping alternative identities and behavior onto his characters, Hartley also works against lazy notions of "the (stereo)typical" and of an essentialism that stresses universal and stable identities. In a complex and sophisticated way, Amateur communicates what cinema always knew but in its privileging of the formulaic all too often forgot: that identity is always performed, in flux, and multi-dimensional.

With its mysterious plot and enigmatic characters, Amateur delights in keeping its audience in the dark. Visually, twilight and shadows are an essential part of the film's vocabulary, and the bluish light of the many night scenes creates an atmosphere that is at the same time soothing (even celestial) and eerie. Similarly, by frequently denying us a final reaction shot, or by offering us only an expressionless face, Hartley never quite tells us how to react, how to take the sometimes outrageous and strange statements his characters deliver so matter-of-factly. Just as his portrayal of violence undermines established viewing strategies (e.g. Edward's almost grotesque shooting of Jan), these devices force us to think for ourselves, outside the box. Poetry, Hartley knows, like discovery, emerges from uncertainty.

Of course, Amateur's blurring of categories is also successful in terms of genre. Plot, shooting style, pacing, dialogue (and its delivery) as well as character constellation all have elements of a thriller, a romance, an action film, a comedy, an outsider drama, and even a neo-noir mystery. This eclecticism makes Amateur Hartley's most accomplished and exciting work, one that resonates well with a postmodernism that emphasizes that the new can only spring from a conscious, critical, and parodic re-combination of the old. By first quoting and then going beyond them, the film pays homage to and simultaneously undermines these generic conventions. Together with its denouncing of both the objectification of women (who exist as commodities, or "useful things" as Jan the torturer and economics grad explains) and the unlimited influence of corporate money, Amateur's political agenda lies exactly in this conflation of genres which turns into a potent parody of seemingly unalterable conventions prescribed by a Hollywood industry intent on producing slick and easily consumable output.

Hartley's often detached and ironic combination of these different filmic codes, his crossing of boundaries, makes Amateur a film of many languages that refuses to project a one-dimensional vision where diversity, hybridity, and fusion make up contemporary reality. Off-screen, this is underlined by the fact that Amateur is, like most of Hartley's films, an international production (like Jim Jarmusch, he has become a household name for European and Japanese cinephiles, which enables him to fund a good part of his projects off-shore); while on-screen a story enfolds that is haunted by the very real specter of multinational capital. Through the characters of Isabelle and Sofia, Amateur also becomes a film of many accents, again mirroring the heterogeneity of modern, particularly urban, spaces.

Amateur is Hartley's first film shot in New York City, and although the city metaphor all but too perfectly captures contemporary fragmented existence, New York is constantly being withheld from us. There are few establishing shots and the protagonists frequently take up all the space within a frame so that, visually, New York is never quite "delivered to us." Instead, what we get are bits and pieces: an ironic nod at its proverbial unfriendliness (the waitress at the diner), Central Station is mentioned, one scene is even set there (although, of course, there is no panoramic view), the Hudson River is referred to, and Edward is tortured in a huge deserted warehouse, a New York City signature space at least before gentrification; most importantly, however, it is the soundtrack with its constant humming and buzzing of voices, its kaleidoscope of ambient sounds, its Cagean symphony, that breathes New York. The city is, like Thomas's past, both present and absent - a shadow that defines and at the same time eludes its owner.

Almost all of Hartley's films are complex meditations on outsiders and explore different ways of belonging, of relating to others and oneself. In Amateur, the characters, always on the run from the invisible but omnipresent arms dealer Mr. Jacques, are caught up in the web of a late capitalist system which mocks their every move towards independence; even the convent, a space typically removed from the workings of "the real world," cannot provide safety. The toying with the notion of the inescapable, of a predetermined fate, runs through Amateur and is emphasized by an ethereal, even angelic soundtrack (written by Hartley himself) and by a sound-image editing that allows voices to carry over into new contexts. Already at the beginning, for example, such a sound bridge - "and this man will die, he will, eventually, and there is nothing any of us can do about it" - turns a simple line of Isabelle's pornographic short story into a prophetic statement concerning Thomas's fate.

Hartley's characters, then, belong to a different kind of "Lost Generation:" not exile, alcohol, and the experience of war but the omnipresence of all Mr. Jacques stands for (violence, multi-national finance, power, contempt for human lives, etc.), the paralysing effects of being aware of the futility of one's actions, and the ultimate impossibility of re-inventing oneself all relegate them to the margins of society. The outsider topos - together with an affinity for Catholic themes like redemption, confession, or suffering - is present in Hartley's other work as well. In The Unbelievable Truth (1989), an ex-convict and a girl who believes her neighborhood infested with bombs have to confront their own ghosts before they can trust each other. Similarly, Trust (1990) brings together a suicidal outsider and a disillusioned and pregnant teenager; and Henry Fool (1998) tells the stories of a mephistophelian temptor with a dark past and a feeble garbageman who turns into a reclusive literary genius.

Hartley's interest in the bizarre, the untypical, and the marginal/peripheral continues in Amateur (as does his black sense of humor), but it is coupled with a stricter dramaturgy, a rich stylistic eclecticism, and, above all, an extremely sophisticated use of language. Isabelle's poetic pornography, lines like "a highly respectable but ultimately sinister international corporation with political connections," or the intended artificiality of Sofia's idiomatic resolution to become "a mover and a shaker" both consciously rub up against the platitudes of a more and more streamlined cinema and draw attention to their function as linguistic stumbling blocks on the path to easy film consumption. When such lines are spoken, the (postmodern?) quotation marks around them almost become visible on the screen. They also prove that complex dialogues are possible without provoking the ennui only too often associated with art-house films. That Hartley does not intend to take seriously prescribed genre codes results in a dead-on parody of gangster lingo (Jim Jarmusch does a similar thing in his Ghost Dog). How the two hitmen's minds work is as much unmasked by their inane conversation on the intricacies of cell phones as by their cold-blooded and cruel actions. The link between a rudimentary and incapacitated language and dubious and immoral actions is, of course, a highly political one.

In a playful but explicit way, Amateur also illustrates that what we say and what we see is not connected anymore; in other words, that there is less and less correspondence between signifier and signified. The rather mundane example of the stiff squares that are called "floppy disks" asks us to question what is presented to us as absolute and is, possibly, indicative of a failure to communicate, of a loss of common sense. Hartley's delicate ear for linguistic paradoxes only reinforces his characters' position on the periphery of a society oblivious to the importance of language.

What is inaccessible to Thomas is not only society but also the past: his memory. Amnesia has always been an intriguing cinematic device because it has allowed filmmakers both to play with psychological notions of the repressed and to open up a gap between the characters' and the audience's knowledge. This creates suspense (and sometimes irony), but it is also a self-reflexive gesture as it mirrors cinema's inherent paradox: that it preserves and recreates the past while at the same time erasing it. Such a topography of memory and forgetting has, for instance, been created by films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Wenders's Paris, Texas (1983), or, more recently, Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000). In Amateur, the tangled and enigmatic structure of memory (and forgetting) is mirrored in the title sequence with its constantly expanding and receding labyrinthine lines. Thomas's amnesia (also symbolized by his white T-shirt, a blank surface that speaks of both absence and a new beginning) not only drives the film's action and is a powerful metaphor for his "lost-ness;" it also points to his subconscious desire to start again from zero, to wipe out his former self.

His new self is one that is capable of love. It is exactly this introduction of tenderness and compassion into an otherwise dark and sometimes desperate film (a film that more than once stresses the impossibility of forgiveness, for example) that allows Amateur to go beyond a mere portrayal of alienation and futility. In unique Hartley-rhythm - emphasizing pauses, non-sequiturs, and stoic understatements - Thomas and Isabelle slowly fall in love with each other (they are also amateurs in falling in love) and Huppert and Donovan's performances capture the poetry of this emotion without once making it seem corny or sentimental. Just as this unusual couple prefers the low-key to the exaggerated, Amateur's philosophy is often one of subtraction. Thomas's memory is obliterated, objects are left out, creating sparse settings and interiors, and dialogues, thoughts, and sentences are truncated, cutting off observations rather than spelling them out.

It might be this elegant simplicity of means that people refer to when they speak of Hartley's work in the 1990s as that of an auteur. Although both the term and the concept are at least a little bit romanticizing and out-dated, their definition includes notions of a distinctive style and narrative technique, of an artistic autonomy, and of working at a certain remove from well-trodden cinematic paths. All of this is undoubtedly true for Amateur, a polyphonous text and multi-layered film that radicalizes conceptions of genre and narrative heterogeneity, that employs self-reflexive parody in order to complicate conventional viewing experiences, and that poetically explores questions of belonging, of memory, and of identity. It may, eventually, come to stand as an emblematic film of a decade that wrestled with these theoretical premises, a development that would acknowledge the discovery of the outsider, of the peripheral figure at the core of a culture's center.

1. That an author/director both writes and erases (because by producing a textual record s/he makes living memory unnecessary) is Tom Gunning's thought in his book on the film's of Fritz Lang (Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Visions and Modernity, London: BFI, 2000).