An ambitious young actress comes to Berlin to convince an American ex-pat filmmaker she must be his next muse ... Hartley's conscientious assistant in Berlin receives weekly letters from her boss and sends him the books he needs as he struggles in Amsterdam to stage Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's opera, "la Commedia"... A commercially realistic but artistically conflicted playwright lends his Berlin apartment to a young actress friend so she can rehearse her drama school audition while he goes off to save his doomed production in New York ... Hartley and his wife, Miho Nikaido, travel to Japan to see her parents and reflect on 12 years of marriage, her career ambitions, and the adventures of growing older ... An artist-criminal far from home asks his assistant to pirate a rare videotape before the German Post Office Authorities come to confiscate it...

Films included in this collection:

A/Muse (11:00)
Implied Harmonies (28:00)
The Apologies (13:00)
Adventure (20:00)
Accomplice (3:08)

Catalog Number: MC-1087	Type: Shorts Compilation	Genre: Drama
Copyright: 2010	Length: 75:08	Format:  DVD  Region: 0 (All)
TV System: NTSC	ISBN: 0-9760624-3-7	UPC/EAN: 880198108791
Label: Possible Films

This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.

Wholesale Purchasing: Program MC-1087 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750

Exhibition: Program MC-1087 may be licensed for Exhibition.


Films In Compilation

2010-07-06  Pop Damage Devotees of Hartley’s work are strongly encouraged to pick up this collection, along with anyone with an interest in modern experimental narrative.

2010-05-21  Pop Matters By Angelos Koutsourakis Hal Hartley’s Collection of short films entitled Possible Films Volume 2 consists of five pieces small films. I was not familiar with his work so far, but judging from the material in the particular DVD, I can recommend it to anyone interested in films that do not simply intend to copy a reality by means of mimesis, but intend to question the medium of their own articulation. Different and similar in many ways, these five films share an interest in the question ‘what is cinema?’ rather than in the mimetic mirroring of actions. All of them have a common theme, which is the cinema as a medium that stimulates thought and puts the audience at the centre of the hermeneutical activity, asking them to be active participants rather than passive consumers of images. In the first film A Muse a young German actress comes to Berlin to convince an American self-exiled director that he should hire her for his next movie. We see her perpetual struggle to meet him and in the end she learns that the guy, inspired by the windows in the Berlin flats, has moved to the USA to enter the manufacturing industry. Implied Harmonies is in a way a documentary of Hartley’s staging in Amsterdam of Louis Andriessen’s opera, la Commedia. Three stories interject-the story of Hartley’s conscientious assistant who lives in Berlin and endeavours to help her boss with any practicalities; the story of the staging of the opera and the process of its making along with the story narrated by Andriessen’s opera are intertwined and refuse a clear narrative structure. The Apologies starts in an apartment in Berlin, in which a commercial playwright aspiring to adapt Homer’s Odyssey into a film production for Hollywood, lends his apartment to a young actress friend so that she can rehearse her drama school audition. While there, the writer’s former girlfriend appears in the flat, unaware of the girl’s appearance, and delivers an emotionally loaded monologue with regard to their past relationship. Adventure tells the story of Hartley and his wife who travel to Japan to see the latter’s parents and reflect on 12 years of marriage, her career ambitions, and the process of growing older.Accomplice is the story of an artist who asks his assistant to pirate a rare videotape, which contains an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, before the German Authorities come to confiscate it. As already mentioned, the ideal answer to one’s question ‘what are these films about’ would be: they are about cinema and the creative process itself. Hartley’s view of the medium fluctuates between a romantic auteurist mentality and an avant-gardist refusal of authorship and the commodification of cinema, which is the result of the reproduction of the empirical reality. The first aspect of the films can be seen in the director’s fascination with Berlin as an imaginary environment of artistic processes and as a shelter for people refusing to succumb to the demands of the industry. We see images of Berlin, (the place that Hartley lived during the filming of Possible Films 2), in all of the films—images vested with a romantic element, reflecting in a way Hartley’s attraction to the place of his self-imposed exile. On the other hand, the thematisation of the medium that can be seen in this collection entails a rejection of the view of the artist as the person in the seat of knowledge, along with an elimination of the boundaries between artistic process and finished work, and as an extension between art and life. In the first film, the actress’ desire to work for the director she admires becomes the starting point for the exploration of the medium’s potential for an alternative mode of representation. This is frustrated by the film’s ending, in which the director that the girl admires has left filmmaking to become a businessman. The young girl’s passion for creativity is juxtaposed to her artistic hero’s decision to withdraw from creative life. In Implied Harmonies, the process of the opera’s staging, the reality of the film’s making—the documentation of its making—and the final staging of the opera are inseparable. Yet, in the The Apologies the interjecting of the young actress’ story with the confessions on the part of the playwright’s former girlfriend blurs the frontiers between ‘performing’ and ‘being’. Something similar can be seen in Adventure, in which the documentation of a real relationship between Hartley and his wife instigates the exploration of the medium’s ability to capture the individual’s struggle to combine artistic life and social life. The last film, Accomplice, manages to summarise his speculation for a type of cinema that privileges process and unfinished works over products for consumption. As Hartley explains, the images of an American bar in Berlin, along with the voice-over narration that alludes to the film noir tradition, aim at putting forward the conjecture that the artist who refuses to succumb to the mainstream cinema’s status quo becomes the synonym of the criminal, the fugitive and the exiled. In conclusion, the films express a utopian belief in the medium not as a recording device, but as a means of bridging art with life. This approach towards the cinema has been the linchpin of the avant-garde aesthetics which, by prioritising process over finished work, aspires to invite the audience to become a collaborator in the interpretative process and resist to any imposed reified meaning. As Godard is heard saying in the last film, ‘after all I say I am innocently representing a certain belief in motion pictures. We will always be able to do a small movie with friends and to show to someone—OK, you won’t get the Oscar for this, but after all why are you writing and why…? So it will be possible, I have always said that to make movies and to make images and sounds is possible one way or another’. The DVD does not contain any extras, something that in my opinion reflects the director’s indifference towards any paternalistic explanations. The material is simply there and you are asked to endeavour to make sense of it. In sum, this is a very stimulating DVD that is highly recommended to all who retain an element of idealism and romanticism in a word where artistic works are reduced to commodities.

2010-04-27  Filmmaker Magazine By Jason Guerrasio In 2004 Hal Hartley released a series of shorts he made from 1994-2000. Titled Possible Films, which is also the name of his web site where he sells his films and music, Hartley has compiled a second anthology that highlights his time living in Berlin, Possible Films, Volume 2. (He recently moved back to New York.) The five shorts are similar in style (shot on DV) with many of them shot in the same apartment, vary from fiction to non, and were all made within a few years of each other. Exploring small ideas that couldn’t be fleshed out in feature form, Hartley creates intimate works that are honest and feel like they’re done by an artist doing it for the love of the craft, not looking for a quick buck. But would we think anything less from Hartley? A/Muse (2009) - We follow an aspiring actress (Christina Flick) as she searches for an American ex-pat director living in Berlin so she can convince him that she should be his latest starlette. Implied Harmonies (2008) – Here Hartley films a behind-the-scenes look at his production of Louis Andriessen’s opera la Commedia in Amsterdam and intercuts it with correspondence to his assistant (Jordana Maurer) back in Berlin about his struggles completing it. The Apologies (2009) – Having to leave town to salvage his production of The Odyessy, a playwright (Nikolai Kinski) lets a young actress (Ireen Kirsch) use his apartment to rehearse. Hartley also composes the score. Adventure (2008) – Hartley films he and his wife, Miho Nikaido, on a trip to Japan. There they think back on their 12 years of marriage by turning the camera on each other while shooting beautiful shots of the country. Accomplice (2009) – Jordana Maurer returns to play an assistant of an artists who wants her to pirate video of an interview of Jean-Luc Godard. Disc is released today through Microcinema International as well as a remastered edition of Hartley’s classic, Surviving Desire. Desire Disc also includes two short story essays done by Hartley in 1991 and interviews from Hartley and his collaborators.

	Hal Hartley's Surviving Desire MC-1086, 1991 SURVIVING DESIRE (1991, 53 min) is a comedy about obsessive love from the director Time Magazine called “the smartest new outlaw in the movies.” SURVIVING DESIRE is a bold and playful little tale about a handsome young college professor smitten with... more >	$US 24.95 $US 24.95 Educational Rights Details Wholesale pricing available License for theatrical exhibition Availability: Now! Format: DVD, NTSC
	Possible Films - Hal Hartley MC-373, 2005 From the quiet and thoughtful to the loud and ridiculous, this arresting collection of short work by Hal Hartley reveals the tireless experimentation, curiosity, and playfulness that lies behind his many feature films, like The Unbelievable Truth,... more >	$US 24.95 $US 50.00 Educational Rights Details Wholesale pricing available License for theatrical exhibition Availability: Now! Format: DVD, NTSC
	Possible Music MC-485, 2003 This is a collection of the signature tunes from Hal Hartley's movies from 1990 till 2002. It includes work from Trust, Simple Men, Amateur, and other films, as well as pieces from his theater productions. It is a very listenable sequence of music... more >	$US 10.95 $US 10.95 Educational Rights Details Wholesale pricing available Availability: Now! Only 2 left! Format: CD
	Simple Men and Trust Me MC-736, 2006 This beautifully produced presentation of the two films with the original French release art work is now available on Double DVD TRUST Maria is a self-centered teenage suburban brat, until she gets pregnant by her un-loving quarterback... more >	$US 49.99 Educational rights not available Availability: Now! Format: DVD, PAL

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