Robert Altman 1925 – 2006
We lost American film director Robert Altman on November 20th, 2006. I am having one of those strange ‘moments-in-media culture’ that happens to me from time to time when I find myself grieving for someone I never met before in my life. One of the old media literacy maxims is “media construct reality”, and my reality is missing one of its beloved film directors, artists and iconoclasts.
Altman had a rich and varied career as a director and writer, working his way, like many from his time, up through industrial films and television before his success in Hollywood — and though it was not typical success it was great artistic success. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Altman
Altman burst into popular culture in the 1960s with the popular and financial success of Mash, his wonderful black comedy ostensibly set in the Korean War. Of course we all knew it was really Viet Nam, and I have no hope of explaining what a pleasure, ah relief, it was to sit in a theater with hundreds of people and have a collective laugh at the dark specter of insane rationality and war haunting those times. For me and I know many of my friends and acquaintances ‘Mash’ is one of those experiences that epitomizes the 60s and the part of the 70s that were the 60s. From the success of Mash he went on to produce a long list of intriguing films. Nashville, the savage, but respectful, send up of the country music scene and presidential politics, is probably my favorite, but there was also, The Long Goodbye, and, The Player. In later years Altman explored the British Class system in all of its repressed glory circa 1930s in, Gosford Park, featuring an ensemble cast of anybody who is, or wants to be anybody, in British Cinema.
Altman did not make typical Hollywood films. He pioneered a style which used innovative editing [some of it learned from television] and audio tracks in which the character’s spoke their lines in overlapping, disruptive jumbles full of energy and chaos. An Altman film’s audio was more like a typical group conversation in which there are no stars or dominant characters with dramatic authority and big salaries to clear a quiet space into which dialogue and speaking lines are delivered. No one sits quietly while authority delivers their lines and commands in life unless they are coerced and frightened, and in Altman’s films all that is undermined, always. He refused to participate in Hollywood’s cliched notion that ‘story’ sits at the center of all filmmaking, indeed all art making for that matter. His films are episodic and improvisational, and less concerned with control and structure. As Hollywood’s conceit of ‘story’ has since swelled to encompass the thinking of nearly everyone stumbling through our media culture — specially those programming Public Broadcasting, Independent Television Service, or the major foundations — his films have continued to explore characters and the impossible to imagine, or predict, moment, this one, right here, right now.
I was delighted to hear him say in a documentary on 1970s cinema that, “There’s only about 6 stories, 7 stories, basically, I am more interested in behavior.” He clearly respected the intelligence of his audience, and he stimulated our intelligence by making films that were geared to an active, engaged viewer — the kind of films that reward multiple viewings and seem fresh time after time.
I watched Mash the other day on cable and I still love its goofy spirit and fundamentally anti-authoritarian attitudes and aesthetics. Of course we now know it is really about the Iraqi War, and it is still a relief to sit with friends and have a collective laugh at the dark specter of insane rationality and war haunting these times.
