University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Adjunct Faculty Author Gallery 2003 Finding the Essential: A Phenomenological Look at Hal Hartley's "No Such Thing" Kevin Taylor Anderson University of Massachusetts Amherst,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adjunct_sw Part of the Broadcast and Video Studies Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Anderson, Kevin Taylor, "Finding the Essential: A Phenomenological Look at Hal Hartley's "No Such Thing"" (2003). Film and Philosophy. 3. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adjunct_sw/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Adjunct Faculty Author Gallery by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 1 Kevin Taylor Anderson, PhD Published in Film and Philosophy (Vol. VII, 2003) Finding the Essential: A Phenomenological Look at Hal Hartley's No Such Thing Introduction Humanity appears to have an inherent desire to project our collective unconscious into and onto unexplainable phenomena. In doing so, we are forever distancing and delaying what we wish not to confront. Hal Hartley's No Such Thing entertains this desire for projection and presents a less transcendent and more embodied form of these phenomena. He offers the viewer a cinematic meditation suggesting that in a materialist age our belief in the supernatural fades in importance; and thus, our collective unconscious has less of a need for archetypes of otherworldly proportions. This need for projection, however, does not evaporate.