Susannah York (Cathryn) gazes upon the
house and garden of her own nightmarish children's book "In Search of
Unicorns", as well as the distant figure of herself. Images (1972), a vital
and completely virtuosic film slipped quietly into the backwaters on first
release, coming between Altman's bigger critical successes like McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973). Images has since had a chequered
reception and distribution history.
The screens (click to enlarge) are from the new Arrow Blu-ray
which is itself mastered from what I have to call a problematic 35mm print
presumably sourced from Sony (Columbia), itself the likely victim of decades of
neglect and care.
The film belongs right up there
with the much later masterpiece Three
Women (1977), and the earlier and much more narratively straightforward That Cold Day in the Park (1969). In Images Altman depicts, like the earlier
Sandy Dennis movie, a kammerspiel of a closed, even possibly hallucinated
chamber cast of three men and a young girl who takes the lead actress' name of
Susannah, just as York herself takes the name, Cathryn, of the actress playing
the young girl.
I don't want to suggest
splitting Altman's cinema into some kind of binary of big ensembles in Scope,
vs.Kammerspiel, also in Scope. But this movie and Three Women in particular are among the director's most inventive
and limpid exercises in gaze, gaze upon gaze, image and meaning, confounding
narrative and development, and the most basic rules of character drawing. I
think Images only carries one shaky
sequence and that's the "love scene" at the one-hour mark in which
Cathryn appears to be having sex with at least two of the three men in her
orbit. Apart from that sequence giving us the first major insight into
Cathryn's disorder and her imagination, it's the only setup which feels overly
thought through and staged for narrative clarity.
For the rest the movie's ebb
and flow is limpid, and shocking. The more I go back to Altman the more I love
his early work, especially films I haven't watched for decades - the last time
I saw this was mid 1970s. At the time it left me cold. Now its seductive form
tempts me to put it with a very small group of meditative ruminations on
character, narrative and the potential for gaze and the gaze back from the
fourth wall. This movie belongs with Antonioni's Blowup (1966) and The
Passenger (1975), among others although it has its own distinctive
personality and the mischievous dynamic of Altman's own wit and humor.
I feel deeply for the technical
video team at Arrow who had to deal with a very much second generation or later
exhibition print, rather than first gen elements or anything close. Thus the
vagaries of Vilmos Zsigmond's extremely high grain photography in both standard
and telephoto modes really takes a beating from being so far from a first
Camera Negative or Inter-positive. Sony presumably provided the master, as best
they could, and it's taken every ounce of skill from Arrow's mastering and
color timing to get this anywhere near their very high standards. The last
reel, strangely looks suddenly perfectly resolved for grain, dynamic range and
sharpness, as though that one last reel of the film had been better preserved
than the rest, all the more odd as it splits equally into a night-time low
light car trip sequence followed by the all-white studio apartment set that
opened the movie. So, despite the technical limitation, a must buy.
Editor's Note: For more on Altman you can check out these two recent essays by Bruce Hodsdon posted here
and here
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