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By Geoff Carter
In The New Wave 2.0 series, The Pen in Hand Blog will be examining the work of our most provocative and influential filmmakers, artists whose filmic stylings and compelling narratives have stretched the boundaries of modern cinema. Referencing Francois Truffaut’s definition of an auteur, these pieces will be looking at writer/directors whose singular visions have transcended conventional filmmaking and expanded the boundaries of cinematic expression. This week, The Pen in Blog will be examining the intricated layered and beautifully chaotic films of Robert Altman.
Plumbing the Depths: The Films of Robert Altman
Robert Altman’s films are characterized by continually shifting layers of visual imagery and overlapping auditory tracks, a seemingly chaotic menage of conversation and actions—much like a crowded cocktail party. In his film MASH, the mobile hospital’s operating room featured overlapping dialogues between surgeons over adjoining tables. One conversation competes and overtakes another as a third continues over the top, creating a consistent buzzing background of noise, talk, and incidental noise. People enter and exit seemingly randomly, so randomly, in fact, that the viewer must work to determine what’s going on, and as a result, is drawn directly into the action—creating an almost interactive feel between audience and the story. As a result, the viewer can almost believe she is standing ankle-deep in blood next to Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John McIntyre (Elliot Gould).
Altman not only used sound to layer conversational realities, he also used it as a narrative device. When Hawkeye and Trapper place a microphone under the bed of their nemesis Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and his new girlfriend Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman) and broadcast their amorous encounter throughout the camp, the sound at first blares through the camp speaker, but then, as Frank and Hot Lips realize what’s happening, the sound starts echoing and feeding back, echoing (literally) their disbelief at what is happening. Not only their situation—but the sound itself—becomes surreal. Other parts of the soundtrack, composed mostly of a Korean radio station playing popular songs and extremely banal messages., not only provides a structural link between the mostly disjointed sequences, but also is the backdrop of a foreign—and mostly irrational—landscape.
This trademark Altman technique of layering depths of sound and visuals onto the screen is seen in more than a few of his earlier works. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a satirical Western, uses the camera to wander through the ramshackle turn-of-the-century mining town of Presbyterian Church, Washington. Characters are introduced not through traditional expository techniques of more traditional narrative cinema, but in the more natural, almost quasi-documentary method of capturing shards of character personalities in an almost cinema-verité style. As viewers follow the conversations through the restaurant or McCabe’s (Warren Beatty) brothel, they are shaken from their roles as passive viewers and forced to immerse themselves into the reality of the Western frontier town.
The traditional love story between main characters McCabe and Constance Miller (Julie Christie) is subsumed by the clatter and chaotic dialogue of the traditional background stories of minor characters. Altman has promoted the usual traditional background narratives and subplots so that the milieu of frontier life into the forefront of the film, thereby giving the film a vision beyond that of a typical Hollywood love story. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is transformed form a Western into a slice-of-life describing the whole of the Old West, not just a blindered view of it. In one telling sequence, a young cowboy (Keith Carradine) is shot by a wannabe gunslinger simply because he needs another notch on the handle of his gun. There is no honor or nobility in this Old West showdown, just ambition and evil.
Nashville is another of Altman’s films that creates a sensibility of a specific setting, a time and place, an industry, and an American (a)morality that transcends traditional narratives of boy meets girl, star is born, or rags to riches plots. It is simultaneously a hilarious take on the denizens and wannabes of the country music industry and a scathing satire on the American versions of success, ambition, and greed.
The satirical tone of Nashville is another constant thread running through Altman’s work. From MASH, a black comedy that skewers the absurdity, chaos, and sheer human waste of war, to Nashville to more recent works like The Player, a harsh look at the underbelly of the Hollywood film industry, Altman more often than not uses his singular cinematic vision to address the hypocrisies and vicissitudes in society. Other works like The Long Goodbye, his take on Raymond Chandler’s classic LA noir novel, and McCabe, were subtler jabs at the traditional film genres of the Western and the private eye film.
Short Cuts, a later work based on the short fiction of Raymond Carver, while at times reviled for drastic revisions of the renowned author’s work, was a quintessential glimpse of the torn hopes, broken hearts, and shattered lives of a group of loosely connected LA residents. While the stories themselves were completely autonomous, Altman successfully uses Carver’s uniquely isolated and desperate characters to weave a tapestry of American sadness and disappointment.
Like most of Altman’s films, Short Cuts does not give the audience traditional shorthand about what to expect from its characters. From a fisherman (Fred Ward) and his friends who find the corpse of a young girl—and let her cool in the river while finishing their trip—to a couple facing the tragedy of a son hurt in a car accident while fielding calls from an irate baker (Lyle Lovett) to a couple (Robert Downey, Jr., and Lili Taylor) babysitting—and taking advantage of—a neighbor’s living space, eventually assuming their identities. In Carver’s original stories, most characters’ motives were obscured, if not completely hidden, a sensibility uniquely suited to Altman’s style.
In his hands, Short Cuts is a black comedy lampooning the selfish and unthinking wrongs we constantly inflict on each other. It is darkly humorous, disturbing, but ultimately, as with all of Altman’s work, deeply revealing.
During his career, Altman constantly fought studios, producers, and writers while attempting to realize his singular vision. He was an actor’s champion who encourage his people to freely explore their characters through improvisation. He plumbed the depths of cinematic reality, societal foibles, and human existence to give us an outstanding body of work.