A Companion to Robert Altman

Adrian Danks, Adrian Danks

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118338964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Robert Altman presents myriad aspects of Altman's life, career, influence and historical context. This book features 23 essays from a range of experts in the field, providing extensive coverage of these aspects and dimensions of Altman's work.

• The most expansive and wide-ranging book yet published on Altman, providing a comprehensive account of Altman's complete career
• Provides discussion and analysis of generally neglected aspects of Altman's career, including the significance of his work in television and industrial film, the importance of collaboration, and the full range and import of his aesthetic innovations
• Includes essays by key scholars in "Altman studies", bringing together experts in the field, emerging scholars and writers from a broad range of fields
• Multi-disciplinary in design and draws on a range of approaches to Altman's work, being the first substantial publication to make use of the recently launched Robert Altman Archive at the University of Michigan

• Offers specific insights into particular aspects of film style and their application, industrial and aesthetic film and TV history, and particular areas such as the theorisation of space, place, authorship and gender

1
“It’s OK with me”

Introducing Robert Altman

Adrian Danks

On March 5, 2006, Robert Altman (1925–2006) received an honorary Oscar at the 78th Academy Awards for “a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audience alike.” A visibly frail, though equally impervious, Altman was introduced by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, two of the stars of his next and final movie, A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Their rambling and affectionate dialogue provided a neat summation of some of the key and most identifiable qualities and features of Altman’s distinctive, challenging and sometimes iconoclastic work. It also provided a “greatest hits” account of Altman’s career that had trouble embracing and encompassing its full scope and ill-fitting shape: MASH (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996) and Gosford Park (2001), were the films mentioned. Although this list does contain a number of films that failed to meet with commercial or even significant critical success, it is, in hindsight, a fairly common and canonical listing of the director’s significant contributions to American cinema. Aside from throwing in his most consciously “autobiographical” work, the underrated Kansas City, it is a list that fails to adequately account for the troughs, tributaries and tribulations of Altman’s career across industrial filmmaking, network and cable television, major studio productions and art-house projects. Altman’s gracious acceptance, after failing to be awarded an Oscar for Best Director following five nominations across 30 years, is also somewhat incongruous in the context of his often combative and dismissive relationship with the commercial nature, storytelling forms and, even, history of Hollywood. It therefore feels a little odd to open this companion to Altman’s cinema with a discussion of one of the key markers of mainstream or popular critical success. Nevertheless, this late career moment does provide a brilliant illustration of the complex relationship that existed between Altman, the commercial film industry, Hollywood, film criticism and the United States itself. It also illuminates the increasingly affectionate regard in which Altman was held by Hollywood in the final phase of his life and career, and the director’s ultimate, if circumspect acceptance of this role and legacy.

In response to Tomlin and Streep’s introduction, and its often delightful approximation of the overlapping flow and scripted improvisation of a typically Altmanesque “conversation,” Altman exclaimed:

Of course, I was happy and thrilled to accept this award, and I look at it as a nod to all of my films. Because to me, I’ve just made one long film. And I know some of you have liked some of the sections and others of you…. Anyway, [it’s] all right.

(Zuckoff 2009, 499)

But it is unlikely that the Academy itself saw the award as “nod to all” of Altman’s films. His career is littered with works that ended up scaring producers and appalling studio executives, ranging from his first Hollywood feature, Countdown (1968), which reputedly enraged Jack Warner and may have led to the director’s removal from the project (Altman in Thompson 2006, 38), the typically willful and obscure follow-up to the monumentally successful MASH, Brewster McCloud (1970), and the consciously Bergmanesque Images (1972), to the all-but-unreleased HealtH (1980) and O. C. and Stiggs (1987), the massive financial failure of the expensive Paul Newman “vehicles” Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) and Quintet (1979), and such 1990s films as Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Kansas City and the incongruous John Grisham adaptation, The Gingerbread Man (1998).

The wonder of Altman’s career and his resilient reputation was his ability to keep producing work no matter the critical and commercial response to his earlier or immediately prior creations. Also remarkable were the seemingly endless array of producers, financiers, studios (of various sizes and configurations) and collaborators who wanted to work with him despite the general lack of commercial success that met the overwhelming majority of his 37 feature films. Justin Wyatt (1996) has provided a fascinating and now seminal account of the deflating, even disastrous box office performance of Altman’s films, while also highlighting the director’s mercurial ability to survive across the various strata of the film and television industries, retain and reinvigorate critical attention, and present himself as a distinctive and marketable “auteur”:

Alienated from both the major studios and the major independents, Altman illustrates the thorny intersection between cinema and authorship through a career decisively shaped by the diverse economic forces and industrial concerns which have defined Hollywood cinema for the last three decades. (65)

More commonly, Altman is conceived as an art film director who worked within and around the commercial American film industry. This is the central premise of Robert T. Self’s (2002) important and ongoing work on the form, style and narrative organization of the director’s cinema: “Altman’s films ask to be read in a constant tension with the dominant process of American filmmaking across the last three decades of the twentieth century” (xvii).

But Altman’s comments to the Academy are also a little misleading in other ways. Despite the fact that his work is often extremely distinctive and clearly identifiable, encompassing an audiovisual style characterized by a constantly moving and shifting frame (often enhanced by the use of multiple cameras), interweaving characters and plotlines, a restless pulling between and across various points of focus and attention (Figure 1.1), a cacophonous soundtrack often captured on copious microphones, and an often audacious combination of realism and heightened artifice, it ought never be described as constituting “one long film”. As I will go on to outline below, Altman’s work shifts across genres, interior and exterior spaces, subjective and objective states, panoramic, mosaic or networked narrative forms and more intimate chamber dramas, buddy films and goofy comedies.

Figure 1.1 Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) arrives at the airport in Nashville (1975) directed by Robert Altman, produced by American Broadcasting Corporation, Paramount Pictures.

Although Altman’s work is most commonly set in the contemporary moment, he also made film and television productions within specific genres that are preoccupied by the past (such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians), lightly periodized war films that adapt literary properties set during World War II (1988’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), and in Korea (MASH) and Vietnam (1983’s Streamers), and a particularly revealing suite of movies that revisit the 1930s: Thieves Like Us, Kansas City and Gosford Park. These last three films are particularly resonant or revealing as they reflect upon, even if indirectly, the cultural, historical and psycho-geographical terrain of Altman’s formative years in Kansas City as a young child and teenager (though we should always be careful when attempting to read any of Altman’s work autobiographically). Altman’s attempt to describe his output as literally a single “body of work” also fails to account for his “formative” work in the 1950s and 1960s. His status as the “insider’s outsider,” or vice versa, a maverick who managed to create a vast array of work in the dominant forms and genres of American cinema and television, was further highlighted by the film that surprisingly took home the major honor that night in early March 2006: Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), an ensemble, race-baiting narrative set within the tangled web of contemporary Los Angeles that clearly betrayed and demonstrated an ongoing debt to Altman.

Finding Altman

As I have indicated above, it isn’t easy to know where to start with Altman. My own formative and disparate experiences of Altman’s work range from a suburban film society screening in Melbourne of the ensemble-based A Wedding (1978) when I was a teenager in the early 1980s, initial viewings on VHS and television of the 1970s works severely impaired by the quality and size of the image and the use of pan-and-scan, and an awareness that the phenomenally popular TV series M*A*S*H was based on an earlier, racier model (MASH was actually the first film I ever watched on home video). These encounters left me less aware of the aesthetic qualities and accomplishments of Altman’s cinema than a sense of their “immediate” texture, their atmosphere and approach to the behavior of actors and characters. I’d also trace my increasing critical fascination with Altman to a repertory viewing of McCabe & Mrs. Miller some time in the 1980s, a film festival screening of Tanner ’88 in Melbourne in the early 1990s, a late-night encounter with Vincent & Theo (1990) on commercial television, and a train ride from Paris to Brussels in the early 1990s in the unexpected company of one of Altman’s two French-Canadian cinematographers (this enjoyable but truly chance encounter is now somewhat vague in my memory, but I think it was Pierre Mignot). It took some time, therefore, for me to come to Altman.

These somewhat random encounters reflect the shape-shifting identity and nature of Altman’s often unkempt or unruly films and the ways in which we might encounter them. As David Thomson (2002 ) has argued:

Whether from confusion or density, Altman is that rarity in American cinema: a problem director, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 “It’s OK with me”
• Part One: Zoom in: Becoming Altman
• Part Two: “I’ve got poetry in me”: Seeing and Hearing Altman
• Part Three: Placing Altman: Space, History and Genre
• Part Four: Being Altman: Character, Performance and Situation
• Part Five: Zoom out: After “Altman”
• Index
• End User License Agreement