Featuring new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley's work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.

One of the most significant contributors to the American independent cinema that developed over the late 1980s and 1990s, Hal Hartley has throughout his career created films that defy convention and capture the stranger realities of modern American life. The Cinema of Hal Hartley looks at all of Hartley's film releases - from cult classics such as The Unbelievable Truth and Trust to oddball genre experiments such as No Such Thing and Fay Grim to short films such as Opera No. 1 and Accomplice - and makes a case for seeing Hartley as an important and successful American auteur, despite the director's decline in status in the later stages of his career. Employing both industrial and close textual analysis, the book considers aspects of Hartley's work such as genre, gender and form, as well as dimensions far less frequently discussed in studies of indie directors, such as place and cultural identity, offering a broad and innovative study of a productive filmmaker who continues to show a singular disregard for the expectations of both the mainstream and the indie cinema industries.

Over the course of nearly thirty years, Hal Hartley has cultivated a reputation as one of America's most steadfastly independent film directors. From his breakthrough films – The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), and Simple Men (1992) – to his recently completed 'Henry Fool' trilogy, Hartley has honed a rigorous, deadpan, and instantly recognizable film style informed by both European modernism and playful revisions of Classical Hollywood genres. Featuring new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley's work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, the contexts of his authorial reputation, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking. This book, up-to-date through Hartley's latest film, Ned Rifle (2014), includes new scholarship on the director's early work as well as reflections on his cinema in connection with new theories and approaches to independent filmmaking. Covering the entire trajectory of his career, including both his features and short films, the book also includes new readings of several of Hartley's seminal films, including Amateur (1994), Flirt (1995), and Henry Fool (1997).

Simple Men tells the story of two brothers, thrown together in search of their father. The pair confront their expectations of themselves and their attitudes towards women. It was premiered as part of the Official Competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

"Since the late 1980s, Hal Hartley has challenged standards of realist narrative cinema with daring narrative constructions, character development, and the creation of an unconventional visual world. In this pioneering critical overview of his work and its cultural-historical context, Mark L. Berrettini discusses seven of Harley's feature films ... Drawing on journalism, theories of representation, narrative and genre, and cinema history, Berrettini discusses the absurdist-comedic representation of serious themes in Harley's films: impossible love, coincidence and human relations, extreme isolation, and the restrictions posed by gender norms. He notes how these themes reappear withing framing narratives that shift from the seemingly mundane in Harley's earliest works to the vibrantly creative and fantastic in his later films. Employing close analysis and theories related to cinematic narrative and realism, the book considers aspects of American independent cinema and postwar European cinema, antirealism, and minimalism. The volume concludes with a pair of in-depth interviews with the director from two distinct points in his career."--Back cover.

When his wife dies young, hot tempered Ironworker Jim Fulton is left with four children and a neighborhood of relatives willing to help raise them. Though loved and respected, Jim struggles with his favorite son's growing radicalism and resistance to racial injustice.