Hard Eight (1996, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Monday 14th of July, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Monday the 14th of July from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature film, Hard Eight (1996). The film is 1 hour 42 minutes long so the screening will finish around 8:45pm.
Hard Eight was an expansion of Anderson’s 1993 short film Cigarettes & Coffee about a man who talks to an older man at a diner over cigarettes and coffee, from which a narrative develops in which five people are connected through a $20 bill. (Possibly an echo of The Earrings of Madame De…, where five characters are connected by the circulation of a set of earrings.) The short film, partly financed with $20,000 Anderson won gambling, was a success on the short film festival circuit and led him to be invited by the Sundance Institute to develop a feature film based on it.
In Hard Eight, John Finnegan (John C. Reilly) is homeless and sitting outside a diner in Sparks, Nevada when he encounters Sydney Brown (Philip Baker Hall), an older man and professional gambler. Sydney offers to help John win money and takes him under his wing. But the question emerges, why is he doing so?
Featuring performances from Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson, and a memorable one-scene role for Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film is a terse initial statement of some of Anderson’s recurring concerns. His penchant for flawed father or surrogate father figures, later developed so thoroughly in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and The Master; his interest in places proximate to somewhere bigger and more important - here, Reno, Nevada; his preference for motivated camerawork that conveys the subjectivity of his protagonists. The film also marked his first collaboration with the cinematographer Robert Elswit, who would go on to shoot all of Anderson’s films up to Inherent Vice except The Master, and the composer Jon Brion who would go on to create the music for Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.
Generically, the film sits squarely within the neo-noir genre, popular in Hollywood from the late 1970s onwards but still thriving in the 1990s in films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1997) and The Big Lebowski (1998). But where those films’ approach to the genre was formally experimental, blown up to an epic scale, and playfully irreverent, respectively, Hard Eight is more classical and pared down, driven by Anderson’s overriding interest in character and performance.