12.1 Robert Altman

 Robert Altman

Altman’s Hollywood career can be divided into three phases.
1)Between 1968 and 1975 he was part of the “Hollywood Renaissance" of directors like Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola.” (2) (Links to an external site.) 

MASH, Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974) and especially Nashville were major contributions to the reformulation of Hollywood formulas of story and style.

 2)By the end of the 1970s, however, with the successful advent of “post-classical” films like Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), Star Wars (1977), and Superman (1978) by young directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the high concept blockbuster film ended the days of experimental art-cinema films.

After the box-office failures of Quintet (1979), A Perfect Couple (1979), Health (1979) and Popeye (1980), production money disappeared, and Altman could no longer sustain his independent Lions Gate studio.

 For most of the 1980s, then, from Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) to Vincent and Theo (1990) he became an artist-in-exile, shooting films in 16 mm, working as an artist in residence at the University of Michigan, making films for cable television, living in Paris.

3)In 1992 The Player enjoyed large popular and critical success and was widely hailed as a comeback. Then, with Altman himself in his 70s, the 1990s witnessed – in Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter,Kansas City (1996), The Gingerbread Man (1998) and Cookie’s Fortune (1999) – the most sustained and aesthetically successful productivity of his career as an art-cinema director. 

Gosford Park reveals the cinematic maestro in serene control of his craft. It earned seven Academy nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture and won the BAFTA award for best picture and the Golden Globe award for best director.

 In his 79th year he made an independent art film about ballet, directed a four-hour television satire for HBO of American presidential politics; directed A Wedding at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and began working on two new films. Since 1967, he has directed a cinematic recreation of 1930s Kansas City jazz, an operetta in a compilation film, 33 movies, 10 major television films – and built one of the most remarkable careers in the history of Hollywood.

That career has consistently been marked by high critical acclaim and hostile popular reception. His refusal to tell straightforward stories, his apparent improvisation of script, his casting unusual actors and stars against type, his restless and obliquely motivated zoom shots, his multiply layered soundtracks – such qualities have regularly been seen as significant innovations in Hollywood story and style or as quirky irritations. 

Reactions to Gosford Park again are representative in their exuberant admiration and characteristic antagonism. The hyperbolic superlatives of the national film critics reflect the qualities of invention now generally ascribed to America’s reigning auteur director: the film is everywhere described as “remarkable”, “brilliant” and “magisterial”. 

Like his other films which famously feature a large ensemble of actors – MASH, Nashville, A Wedding, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Player, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City, Dr. T and the Women (2000) – Gosford Park‘s numerous story lines are perceived as “engrossing”, “entrancing” and “amazing”. The film reflects the director’s “astounding ability to orchestrate dozens of featured players into a coherent whole while allowing each actor individual shining moments.” (3) (Links to an external site.) Andrew Sarris praises Altman’s “patented polyphonic virtuosity” (4) (Links to an external site.).The director who has routinely described himself as a painter rather than a storyteller is compared to Rembrandt, the “greatest flow master in movie history.” Roger Ebert writes: “Here he is like Prospero, serenely the master of his art.” (5) (Links to an external site.)

Yet even as they heap dramatic praise on Gosford Park, critical reviews, again characteristic of popular and journalistic reaction to his work, also point to ways the film disorients, unsettles, and irritates.

It displays again the characteristics of Altman’s art cinema that have so alienated audiences for 36 years. Its narrative style is chaotic and ungoverned; its multiple plot lines confusing and disorienting; its attempts at plot clarity intrusive, its whodunit indifferent. The film’s ensemble cast is molded together superficially only to puzzle. Altman’s swirling array of characters, bits of dialogue, social commentary, and moving cameras neither cohere nor conclude. Like Mozart accused of composing music with too many notes, Altman directs too many characters. The organization of the film makes it clear that Altman “became quite lost when trying to sort and order this batch of footage. Gosford Park’s structure is evasive, at best, and it is devoid of rhythm.” (6) (Links to an external site.) The schizophrenic gulf here is amazing and typical. Despite the overwhelming acclaim for this and other films and their director, practically every positive perception of Altman’s craft throughout his career has been countered elsewhere by a negative reaction.

These reviews summarize the 36 year critical reaction to Altman’s idiosyncratic, pessimistic, ironic, exuberant and experimental films. Significantly shaping this reaction is the films’ participation in the modernist discourse of the international art cinema. They substitute structure for story and form for representation; they depict debilitated individuals living in constrained circumstances of powerlessness and subservience. They display a cynical view of the commercially motivated idealism of contemporary culture. They reflexively indict the entertainment industry as complicit in the malaise of contemporary American culture. These patterns of discourse in Altman’s films have constantly offended the audience for post-classical Hollywood’s high concept form of entertainment. And they simultaneously define the emergent form and style of the “Americanized art cinema” (7) (Links to an external site.). Altman’s art-cinema narration systematically displays an open and poetic mode of storytelling; a continuing perception of social identity as fragile, fractured, and fragmentary; and a critical self-consciousness about the nature of narrative communication itself.

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Altman has consistently expressed his hostility to narrative causality and closure, and his films dramatically display an antipathy to straightforward, clearly delineated, and causally logical narratives. 

An analysis, for instance, of the scenes cut from Gosford Park reveals that shots and scenes potentially explaining character behavior and motive were systematically removed from the final cut of the film. Throughout his career Altman has relegated motivation to the “subliminal reality” of conflicting, indeterminate, vague, inexpressible characterological desire. We look for explanation of human action, he says, “But there doesn’t have to be one” (9) (Links to an external site.). These films ultimately asked to be read not as realistic fictions but as expressive portraits and murals of modern life.

On one hand, these multiply plotted films become more like reality, where lives intersect in random, chance and discontinuous ways without apparent reasons. Narrative coherence gives way to fragmentary puzzles. On the other hand, Altman has also regularly stated his craft to be that of a painter or a musician. Individual characters, then, bits and pieces of action, interact within the spaces and across the times of his films like tonal signatures or pigments of paint. Character motive, personal relationships, causal behaviour become ambiguous, diffuse, implicit.

A central characteristic of the art cinema is its liberation of the visual and spatial systems of film from the logical system of narrative. Altman’s large casts and diffuse stories actively assist in this process where he says that story itself asks to be read in 3 Women (1977) like a dream, in Kansas City like jazz, in The Company like a pas de deux, in Gosford Park like a tapestry. The editing rhythm of McCabe & Mrs. Miller follows from the musical rhythm of the Leonard Cohen’s music subsequently used on the sound track. Vincent and Theo seems to be motivated by a desire to follow the trail of these two bothers in order that the director can paint with his camera the same people and places of Van Gogh’s paintings. 

Consequently, part of the difficulty in following the complex play of stories in Altman’s films is their modernist presumption that meaning emerges from the simultaneous perception of connections among images and phrases in space that have no consecutive relationship to each other in time. Each of the 24 roles in Nashville is a color whose meaning resides in its proximity to adjacent colors and its various intensities within the figure the film makes. 

Similarly the multiple fragments in Short Cuts coalesce ultimately not just as the threads of disrupted stories but as the musical accompaniment to the classical, new age, and jazz compositions that shape the whole film.

Altman’s films strikingly illustrate that the art cinema is a poetic as well as a narrative art. The sombre palette of gold and green in Images (1972); the restless, sensuous and ambiguous zoom and pan shots in Nashville and 3 Women; the pointillistic final sequence in the blizzard in McCabe and Mrs. Miller; the exhilarating color and music of fashion in Prêt-à-Porter, the compulsive repetition of red and black throughout The Gingerbread Man), the stunning contrast of primary colors during the ballet performances with the honey-brown spaces of rehearsal and life in The Company – these qualities reflect the eye of a painter. Altman has consistently asserted that the goal of his films is an emotional rather than an intellectual effect:

I look at film as closer to a painting or a piece of music; it’s an impression…  an impression of character and total atmosphere… The attempt is to enlist an audience emotionally, not intellectually (10) (Links to an external site.).

Narrative hardly disappears in Altman’s film, despite his self-description as a painter. In another aspect of the art cinema, Altman’s film aggressively interrogate popular narrative genres, almost as though he has been involved in a research and development project systematically to revise Hollywood’s major product lines. Images is a psychological thriller. MASH is a combat film. The Long Goodbye is a hard-boiled detective film. Nashville is a musical. McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill are westerns. Quintet is science fiction. A Perfect Couple and Popeye are musical comedy romances. The Gingerbread Man is film noir. 

These well-known narrative forms provide the director platforms from which to display other concerns about the nature of human behavior and its cinematic observation. Their stories seldom provide the context for significant, heroic action; rather they reveal spaces that enclose and forces that act upon a multiplicity of selves. Graphic and rhythmic dimensions of editing and cinematography frequently come unstuck from generic logic. Story moves psychologically from apparent external to obscure internal motivation. Plot becomes a project open-ended, ironic and ambiguous. Unfamiliar and unusual actors play against the star system, and stars play against their box-office personas. The innovative expressivity of the auteur director produces a metaphoric, often moody and contradictory, generally oblique discourse rather than the effaced zero-degree of style in the classical narrative cinema.

- Robert Self, Senses of Cinema - Read More at the Link - Here

SEE YOUTUBE THREE REASONS: NASHVILLE - Link Here

SEE YOUTUBE
ON WARREN BEATTY AND JULIE CHRISTIE - Link Here

SEE ON YOUTUBE
PERFORMING PERSONA: ROBERT ALTMAN'S "3 Women" - Link Here

SEE YOUTUBE MASH (1970) CLIP
MASH - THE LAST SUPPER -Link Here