Altman was one of the last of the great post-war modernist American film-makers (and for certain it was the box-office disaster that was
Popeye, destroying his production company, that set him back for over a decade, dividing his film-making trajectory into two peak periods - late-60s to late-70s, and early 90s). Indeed, many of his films only now might seem dated precisely because the techniques he pioneered - rhythmic editing to soundtrack, multiple fragmentary plots, multiple simultaneous sound sources, multiple fractured identities, the subversion of classical (and neo-classical) film narratives, narrative coherence dissolving into a complex tapestry of motiveless characters, the construction of interconnections among apparently unrelated stories from a vast canvass of numerous actors, the splintered oneiric dimension of the self, structure and form over story and representation, among others - are now so taken for granted, though usually for all the wrong reasons, as to be invisible to contemporary audiences. He was among the first to structure a narrative according to the soundtrack (
McCabe and Mrs Miller, edited according to the rhythms of Leonard Cohen's music;
Nashville, using
the 24-track recording system in a one-to-one pairing with the film's 24 characters, etc). Even his less popular films were innovative: the schizophrenic narrative of the oneiric psychodrama,
Images, though clearly influenced by such as Polansky's
Repulsion and other films from the European avant garde (like Bunuel's
Belle de Jour), went on to inspire the likes of David Lynch; the neo-noir
The Long Goodbye, adapted from the novel by Raymond Chandler, though featuring one of Bogart's most famous characters, Philip Marlowe, irreverently subverts the noir genre, with the stereotypical hardboiled private eye now portrayed as a hapless, maladjusted incompetent, comically out of touch with contemporary society and morality.
And
Short Cuts, in particular, in many ways anticipates the present pomo/connectivist/hypertext/cyberspacial reality - with its perception of life that explodes the form of the linear centered narrative and renders life as a multiform flow, a perception of our reality as one of the possible - often even not the most probable - outcomes of an open or indeterminate situation, this idea that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our "true" reality as a spectra of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency. As Zizek observes, "
'Short Cuts,' with its series of faiths, contingently hitting each other. Very Deleuzean: global nonsense where contingent encounters produce local effects of sense in order to understand what subjective in our late capitalist society means."
Of course, there were some real turkeys in Altman's output: the SF feature
Countdown, released in the same year as
2001: A Space Odyssey, which I cringed my way through a few years ago, seemed like a Kubrick script - as directed by Ed Wood ...
But even in other areas Altman resisted hegemony. He certainly also contradicted and challenged the ridiculous ageism prevalent throughout the film world: at the age of 79 he made
The Company, the Malcolm McDowell-featuring independently-funded art film about ballet, directed a four-hour television satire for HBO about American presidential politics; directed
A Wedding for the stage at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and initiated and completed pre-production for two new films - quite an achievement for anyone at any age. How many other film-makers of his age/era who are still alive are still working [or allowed to work]? Apart from Godard, Boorman (at 78, Boorman's just released his latest film -
A Tiger's Tail - a scathing satire on contemporary Irish predatory capitalism, starring Brendan Gleeson) and a few others, none.
Great director. Didn't get Gosford park though. Could be the amount of Brit actors in it though, so worthy-dull by rep most of them are, kind of acted as a de-intensifier on the whole experience?
Try
this.
