Courtesy Canadian Film Institute Hal Hartley’s latest film, Meanwhile, was featured in this month’s retrospective of the director’s work.
The Canadian Film Institute is giving audiences the opportunity to see an American film director as they’ve never seen him before.
The institute, along with the U.S. embassy is presenting American Possibility: The Cinema of Hal Hartley. The retrospective has already featured three Hartley films, a selection of his short films and daily appearances from the director from Feb. 1-3.
It runs from Feb. 27 to March 2, with Hartley’s movies Henry Fool, The Girl from Monday, and Fay Grim playing at the Library and Archives Canada Auditorium on Wellington Street.
Hartley was an obvious choice for a retrospective, says the institute’s executive director Tom McSorley.
After attracting a lot of attention in the early 1990s with films like The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, Hartley remained independent of the major studio system.
While mainstream appeal has alluded Hartley, McSorley says the filmmaker’s talent lies in his differences from Hollywood.
“Hartley’s work is much (smaller) in its scale, much larger in its ideas than most of the stuff we get through,” McSorley says. “Plus, he’s a very good commentator and storyteller about America, particularly pre-9/11 and post-9/11. I think his films are some of the most interesting reflections of that country’s recent decade, for example, than anyone we’ve seen anywhere else.”
While McSorley praises Hartley’s post-9/11 work, he admits that much of the buzz around the filmmaker has died down in the last decade.
The retrospective focuses as much on Hartley’s later films as his earlier work. This gives viewers a chance to see more eclectic, shorter films that aren’t as readily available elsewhere, McSorley says.
“(Hartley)’s done a variety of kinds of filmmaking that are very difficult to see in traditional exhibition spaces,” McSorley says. “So I thought that focusing on that for this retrospective would give it a kind of unique quality, and also show his later period stuff to be as interesting, if not more interesting and relevant than his early stuff.”
This attention to smaller films endears the institute to movie junkies, says Bruce White, the programmer at the ByTowne Cinema. The theatre works with the institute and the Embassy of France to show unreleased French-language films.
“For a film fan, it’s very important to see as many movies as possible,” he says, “whether they have big releases in commercial theatres or whether they’re festival-type films. The CFI provides that latter type of film to the Ottawa audience.”
The institute also acts as a credible source for recommendations, says Ottawa Film Society treasurer Michel Rossignol. It offers eclectic movie ideas that the film society can then show members later.
“Often their films are not readily available, or become available later,” he says. “So they give us the opportunity to view the best films for our membership.”
The institute can meet his demand because it is in the capital, McSorley says. Many embassies in the city are available and willing to promote films from their country to a foreign audience. This allows the non-profit institute to operate in a way that commercial organizations cannot.
“We fit into a niche, obviously,” he says. “We’re not the be all and end all. There are lots of great things in commercial movies and theatres, too. We just kick the door open a little bit wider, I guess.”