This is the second part of the twelfth essay in Bruce
Hodsdon’s erudite series devoted to Hollywood directors and the actors they
worked with. It continues the focus on one of the key American independents.
The previous essays can be found if you click on the
links below.
At least eleven books have been
published in English on the work of Robert Altman, plus one “oral biography”
and two book-length interviews (1[i]).
This is exceeded only in number by
booklength studies of D W Griffith, Hitchcock, Welles, Spielberg and
Scorsese. Four have been published in the last three years. A Companion to Robert Altman (2016),
edited by Adrian Danks is comprised of 23 essays. It is, and will almost
certainly remain, not only the most wide ranging but also likely definitive in
the quality and depth of its coverage of all aspects of his work in the cinema,
television and theatre. Unfortunately priced by the publisher beyond what most
individuals will be prepared or able to pay and also unlikely to be acquired by
the local library, this makes it important to at least give some indication
here of the content of what I regard, for the purposes of this survey, as two
of the most important contributions to Companion - the essays on visual
style by Hamish Ford and sound by Jay Beck. The two essays take us into the
core of Altman's 'system' - see the reference to authorship as a system in Cassavetes Part 2 a previous essay of this series in Film
Alert.
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| Robert Altman, 1983 |
Visual Style in Altman's 70s
Films
Altman's films are contained
within what Ford refers to as “a porous frame” - strikingly flexible and inherently unstable - that works to
define and emphasise cinema in and as process. It is a paradoxical mix,
remarkably “free” yet often denuded of traditionally affirmed markers of style.
Rather than exceptions, Altman's zooms remind us of the inherently artificial
and non-human nature (the materiality) of the moving image per se. He is only partially,
reluctantly and sporadically interested in charting a narrative line in his
films, repeatedly making it known in interviews of his interest in cinema as
“painting' or even “music' rather than storytelling.
Rather than psychological or
“expressionist,” Altman's cinema is concurrently objective and subjective,
realist and reflexive. In Ford's estimation, his works' visual style, as
powered so crucially by the zoom lens in its various capacities, is far more
fundamental than any accenting, ornamentation or improvisatory embellishment.
Altman makes more use of the zoom lens than any other filmmaker, its most
frequent use as a device with overtly voyeuristic properties largely undermined
by Altman. Ford finds Altman's use of the 'Scope' (2.35:1) screen as
counterintuitive in that “the lateral expansion becomes quite reflexively
partial, fragmentary and opaque.” Altman works to use this repeated blocking of
viewer desire and expectation triggered by the zoom and the widescreen to
generate enormous space for other kinds of looking and engagement with the
human body onscreen and the world it appears to inhabit as well as the
technical/aesthetic stuff of cinema itself in action.
Altman's cinema lives and
breathes in process rather than outcome. The real secret of Altman's style,
Ford suggests, is perhaps an always reconstituted and paradoxical distancing
brought about through a materialist stress on image texture that is generated,
bordered and characterised by a porous, forever unstable frame ( even as such filmmaking
techniques often appear to bring us closer to the people and reality on
screen).
Altman's films, Ford reminds us,
remain narrative feature films about characters, shot with the extensive use of
what are widely considered stylistic markers of realism such as the zoom and a
filmmaking technique and mode of performance drawing heavily on improvisation.
This results in what Ford sees as a unique and sustained stress on a flexibly
moulded image of a palpably human world on the screen. The open question Altman
poses is how the reflexivity in his overdetermined visual style, which
increases the viewer's sense of the materiality of film itself, might also
serve a realist engagement in the
presentation of the human characters and their world. This, Ford concludes, “remains an open
question.”
The above four paragraphs are
edited from Hamish Ford's essay, “The Porous Frame: Visual Style” pp 119-146.
Altman's Sound Aesthetics in the
70s
In the early 70s Altman used sound to
construct a radical new form of cinematic storytelling. He and his production
teams developed a sound aesthetic using multitrack recording techniques to free
sound and image from the constrictions of the norms of classical continuity and
character goals. Central to this new creativity was the use of overlapping
sound to multiply the number of speaking voices while separating them from
their spatial relationship to the camera and the frame. This allowed a
diversity of voices in production through the “democratisation of acting and
sound techniques.” Actors were encouraged to develop their own conversations
behind the centred character or characters in a process of “overhearing”
introduced in Brewster McCloud so that most, if not all, of the
characters were given a voice and have the potential to be heard. This
displaced the governing ideological premise behind conventional narrative
cinema that requires that the story, not the character voices, take precedence.
Altman uses the loss of a sense of unity with other paradoxes “to offer a
critique of American culture and its underlying myths.”
In McCabe and Mrs Miller overhearing
is developed further, “extraneous” dialogue is heard overlapping and
interrupting dialogue to the extent that much of our understanding of the main
characters is derived from innuendo and overheard gossip. Altman used these
charged sub-conversations to tip the emotional balance of scenes, and in the
process we gain access to a new form of cinematic dialogue that opens up the
potential for all speakers to advance the narrative. As in MASH the film
requires the audience to weave together narrative elements presented in
fragmentary fashion.
Altman honed his techniques of
overlapping and overheard sound in The Long Goodbye further refining his
experimentation with the “democratic voice.” Raymond Chandler's 50s novel is
updated with Marlowe being acclimatised to 70s Los Angeles. In place of the
standard narration by the private eye, Elliott Gould as Marlowe often mutters subjective
thoughts quietly to himself while events happen around him, the audience being
expected to pay as much attention to his barbs and jokes as to the main
dialogue. The established use of looping to replace problematic location sound
recording was used by Altman to give legibility to lines not supposed to be
heard by other characters.
Beck marks California Split as
“a major turning point in Atman's sound aesthetics in how it allowed him to
liberate his characters from the teleological pull of narrative and let the audience
take pleasure in the idiosyncrasies of the characters' personalities.” The
audience placement in the position of outside observers is reinforced by the
anti-dramatic ending.
In Nashville, as in the
previous three films, non-diegetic music scores are replaced by music from
on-screen sources or with a meta-diegetic function as critical commentaries,
the continuity of the audio tracks dictating which images were used and how
they were structured. In the oscillation
between polyphony (three or four simultaneous conversations) and songs “the
alienation of the subject is exposed and and the democratic process is called
into question.” In this, Beck suggests, “Altman achieves a summation of his
audio aesthetics representing his critique of American culture with a true
democracy of multiple voices supplanted in the film by a new national anthem.”
Nashville is the transition point in Altman's
experiments in democratising cinema sound since its production coincided with
the moment “that the rules of classical sound recording and mixing were being
concretised by new technologies.” With the rise of Dolby Stereo in the late 70s
“mandatory mixing techniques returned the voice to the central position
reinforcing the division of labour of classical Hollywood sound thereby
restricting Altman's experiments.”
The aesthetic of the democratic
voice was at odds ideologically with the function of mainstream narrative
cinema. Beck comments that “Altman's grand project of retraining in the use of
sound later waned. By the time of Gosford Park, three decades later,
lines of dialogue tended to be concatenated instead of overlapped and the music
score used to support character and plot development rather than providing
meta-diegetic commentary. The 70s constituted a brief moment of radical sound
experimentation exploiting the capability of recording technology to provide
new models of sound reproduction.”
For a new generation of
filmmakers such as Alan Rudolph, P T Anderson, Lucretia Martel, Thomas
Vinterberg and Michael Haneke, “Altman's sound aesthetics and services offer a
template for other dialectical attempts to rewrite the rules of a new cinema.”
Edited from “The Democratic
Voice: Altman's Sound Aesthetics in the 1970s” by Jay Beck, pp 184-208.
Altman on Actors and Acting
Directors who use actors like
painters use pigment or colour are rare. Most directors believe that the most
important element of a film is the script; that they must tell the actors what
to do. Actors are not allowed to be auteurs. Directors are becoming
increasingly known as auteurs: there are innumerable reports of conflict
arising between writers and directors as to who is the real author of a film.
But it seems to me that the increasingly indefinable relationship between actor
and director has been underestimated...Many actors...are genuine artists, true
creators.
The more confidence I have in an
actor, the more I make him create. People tell me, 'It's wonderful what you
have managed to do with so-snd-so.' But all I did with so-and-so was to insist
that he or she invent. I am not the Creator but the trainer shouting from the
ringside...When I saw Naked, I asked myself who should be credited with
the script. In such a film, the actor is forced to become a considerable
artist, and the differences between creation and interpretation get very
blurred. In a way the actors write their parts.
Actors come to see me and talk
about themselves. What they tell me contributes to the development of their
scenes which are rewritten not by the writer but according to the actors'
behaviour. You see this in the work of John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh. This is
perhaps why actors ask to be in my films. They don't really know why they do
this, but they see things happen on the screen and want to participate in the
process, to become creative, to enjoy a certain artistic freedom. Some actors
can't live in such a situation but most can...Creativity springs form the
actors they are more than just interpreters.. If one sees qualities in my films
they arise out of the chemistry of the ensemble (2[ii])
Adrian Martin sees Altman's
essential contribution to modern American cinema as located in his very
particular way with characters and characterisation. In 1996, reviewing Kansas
City, Martin noted that Altman “captures a certain shade of real human
behaviour like no other filmmaker around.” He identifies Raymond Durgnat as the
only critic who had tried to describe this unconscious form of behaviour in
labelling Altman as “an explorer of the preconscious” in a singular form of
alienation “as if they have a swarm of bees in their head” without being
consciously aware of it, like Van Gogh in Vincent and Theo. It can
assume a certain fluidity between characters like Blondie and Caroline in Kansas
City. Everybody in an Altman film “can act in an oddly disconnected way as
if they are not exactly sure who they are.”
[i] . The authors : Judith M Kass (1978), Alan Karp (81),
Gerard Plecki (85), Patrick McGilligan (89), Helene Keysser (91), Robert D Self
(02), Rick Armstrong ed. (11), Kathryn R Altman (15), Frank Caso (16), Robert
Neimi (16), an oral biography by Michael Zuckoff (10), and interviews by David
Sterritt (00) and David Thomson (06).
[ii] An edited version
of “The Actor as auteur” by Robert Altman in a special issue of Projections
no. 4 ½ (published between issues 4 and 5 in 1995), pp 9-13.
Main Sources for parts 1 and 2. Essays by Adrian Danks,
Hamish Ford, Jay Beck, Virginia Wright Wexman and Claire Perkins, A
Companion to Robert Altman 2016. David
Thomson Altman on Altman
2006; A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema 6th ed.
2014. Thomas Elsaesser The
Persistence of Hollywood 2012 Ch 15. Jonathan Rosenbaum “Improvisations and
Actions in Altmanville” Essential Cinema pp 80-94. Adrian Martin, reviews of Nashville, Short Cuts, Kansas City, Gosford
Park, et al filmcritic.com.au
Thanks to the librarians at the invaluable AFI
Research Collection at RMIT for their assistance.
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