In the current filmic atmosphere, Henry Fool is a dangerous product. It is a highly moral film, and by that I do not mean a film with a message to shove down the throats of it's viewers, Instead it is a film about choice itself, the human necessity for resolution. All of Hartley's films, in particular Trust and Amateur, are about such acts of becoming, and Henry Fool is no exception. It is occasionally muddled and obscure yet it still emerges as a brave and moving film.
The two main characters of the film, Simon Grim and Henry Fool(e), exist both in and outside the belly of the whale, that tenuous wall between a waking nightmare and a soporific wonderland. Both of them are carictures, Simon as the Beckettish loner and Henry as the jovial Rabelais, full of wine, women and song. Henry is also full of manifestos and maxims, always on hand to separate the subjunctive and possessive verb. He is what Henry Miller would call a "living book", a walking creation who chews and spits out information vigorously and is inherently "literary" if literature had not already fallen from him. That is why his "Confessions" are such a failure; he has created no Rousseau-like facade that needs literary deconstruction. What is literary, at least in the T.S Eliot sense of the word, is the extinguishing of personality, the masking of that inescapable "I". Henry is all bluster and ugly truth, and you assume that his writing is a direct outlet of this lifestyle. For Simon writing is a more typical kind of catharsis, a long diatribe against the world that is immediately deemed pornographic and worthless. In Hartley's rather cliched view of writing, the silent genius suddenly creates while the erudite alkie stumbles with pen placed in hand. There is something disturbing about the gap between these two men and their talent for writing, something manufactured and geared towards Hartley's simplistic symbolism. What is important to remember is that this film exists at primarily at a metaphoric level. Henry and Simon represent the inability of the writer to find a place in modern society. The two writers complement each other, and the friendship between them is, to Hartley, more important than the writing inspired by it.
Poems can hurt no-one...Friendship over meter...Even in the winter of our ladies literary prize...It'll all fade away...hills of beans, coffee machines, dead white men and the irrefutable masterpieces...the flux of personality, the give and the take...a humble attempt at being different...the birth of computers...the death of literature...a pederast...a performer...faith above all, the priest and the poet above the talk show host and the stand up comedian...waste indeed...we want stories...teachers on a three month parole, incoherent...start the show, start the show...a compromised friendship...all communication is risk...pure risk, in dawn light, she mumbled and he faltered...melodrama in the end...and in my beginning is my end...the heroes...the clumsy...the confused...the awkward...you cannot read life like a book...a dead eunuch...everyone listens to there own hearing so no-one hears...MAKE IT NEW...recycled and on shore leave...Dickens is dead, Rilke died lonely...a crushed writer in the empty terminal...a free man on the tarmac...
adam rivett
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An analysis of performance and composition in Hartley's work to date.