Though each of Hartley's feature films focuses on two or three characters who are on a pilgrimage toward self-awareness and shows a young heterosexual couple emerging hesitantly into some kind of relationship, they fly in the face of genre expectations. These modernist melodramas do not attempt to manipulate the audience or to signal what it 'should' be feeling. Characters may, startlingly, give speech to their innermost thoughts but emotionalism is pared back. The hypnotically off-kilter result throws into stark relief the thorny issues that Hartley's characters brood on in their terse exchanges. The language is less engaged in trying to pin down the truth, and the images are distinctly different to the images I have made before.
Less time is spent refuting things in favour of action and reaction.
I think I've become less furious for definition. One of the things that keeps coming up in my notebooks is, 'Stop trying to justify things. He was born and brought up, as a Roman Catholic, in the Long Island suburb of Lindenhurst. He went on to attend the Massachusetts College of Art, transferring in 1980 to the film school of the State University of New York, where he studied under the late director-editor Aram Avakian . After college he returned to Lindenhurst and worked for a while with his father in the construction business, before finding a job in Manhattan with a company making public-service announcements.