This is the first part
of the twelfth essay in Bruce Hodsdon’s erudite series devoted to Hollywood
directors and to the actors they worked with. This essay focuses on one of the key
American independents.
The previous essays
can be found if you click on the links below.
Bruce writes: This
essay is a continuation of the brief portraits of notable auteur directors in
Hollywood and their place in the industry.
The focus is on their working methods especially with actors. The essays
provide an impressionistic representation of the changing face of authorship
from the birth of Hollywood to long form tv and are intended to complement Barrett Hodsdon's recently published The Elusive Auteur. In part 5 of his book
Barrett charts and profiles the new breed of auteurs that emerged in the
seventies: Lucas, Spielberg, Eastwood, Stone, Scorsese and Tarantino.
It has been noted elsewhere that
critics and scholars writing on Altman face the particular challenge that his
body of work, more than most, resists interpretation and being narrowed down to
a single formula or a single set of meanings. The same might be said for the
much smaller oeuvre of John Cassavetes (discussed in two previous parts here and here.) Both Altman's and Cassavetes' work
are marked by a consistently open approach to collaborative risk taking in what
has been described as “an interrogation of classical Hollywood storytelling and
popular genres” ([i]).
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| Robert Altman, 1983 |
Altman was in the forefront of
the changes including awareness of European cinema incorporated into American
films in terms of consciousness and self consciousness (Images, 3
Women), and challenging audiences through the hybridisation of American
genres (McCabe & Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us).
An important element in his resilience through box office and critical failures
and disasters in the second half of the seventies was the forming of his own
production company. He set up Lion's
Gate Films (not to be confused with the more recent Lionsgate Entertainment) in
1970 for production freedom following the box office bonanza of MASH.
Altman equipped the studio to facilitate his experiments with multi-track sound
in his films while producing other films like those of Alan Rudolph, as well as
his own.
The rise of the modern director
as auteur is exemplified by Altman in his control and inflection of new forms,
at least through that 'golden decade' of experiment in Hollywood, 1967-77. In
doing this, Altman made expressive use of the technical devices of modern
cinema such as zoom and telephoto lenses already taken up by television, and
the layering of sound initially begun in
Brewster McCloud (1970) with California Split (1974) and Nashville
contributing to the sense of a loosely structured lived reality or in McCabe
to a dream-like unreality. The dreamy and the disjunctive aspects come
together satirically in The Long Goodbye (“a 53 novel in 73 LA, a suit
and tie in a pot smoking haze”), and given weird off the wall extension
in Popeye which Altman made as an anti-Broadway musical. The
instability and the loss of control which centrally inhabit the thematic
threads of the characters' loss of control formed the basic pattern underlying
the stories. The plot is often the least interesting part of an Altman movie.
“In my films I try to reflect my view. Its what I see, not the way I
think things should be.”
Nashville is the paradigm of what Adrian Danks terms a
“panoramic form” utilising an “ensemble aesthetic” involving a mosaic of
interlocking plot lines subject to a constantly shifting camera perspective accompanied
by multi-tracked sound and overlapping dialogue. Virginia Wexman tells us that
Altman adopted Chicago's Second City Troupe founder Vida Spolin's idea of
theatre experience as a communal game turning the film into one involving the
spectator. He broke with tradition in depicting many of the relationships
between the characters as unstable. The actors were encouraged to write their
own speeches which Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury then vetted in advance of
filming.
David Thomson provisionally suggests
that Altman “backs away from tragedy or real comedy: a sort of alert, floating
drift is his essence, and it works best when people are involved for whom depth
can be avoided.” This does raise the
question of how good he was with actors? And “how far he rejects the well-made
movie (in a spirit of innovation) or cannot reconcile himself to its
discipline?” Thomson points to his awareness of the camera's power of
observation engaging the viewer in “a new way of seeing.” Altman shot two
thirds of his pictures in the 2.35:1 anamorphic ratio because contrary to most
of the veteran directors who worked in classical Hollywood Altman believed
“that's the way you see.”
He spoke of how, through his
camera style, he aimed to take the preciousness out of period drama, taking the
formality out of it by going back to camera work in The Long Goodbye which
unconventionally is not motivated by the rhythm of the action. He wanted
what he called “a sloppy and ragged look” not using close-ups, the whole of the
area lit for filming with multiple cameras so that the actors did not know
precisely when they were on camera. Altman himself largely discarded the script
while filming a scene and did not block the actors preferring each to find
their own space. They all also wore
radio mikes freeing them from taking turns in playing to the camera lens,
theatrical style, to deliver their lines. In this way with two moving cameras
“the tempo of the script takes on its own life.” The camera is moving much of
the time, adding what Altman called a “voyeuristic effect” frequently cutting
on panning movement, challenging the 'rules' of classical mise-en-scène.
Towards the end of his life
Altman admitted to David Thomson that he didn't understand acting, that he
“didn't understand how they did it -
what anybody's technique is.” While he had early connections with the Chicago-based
Second City Troupe which staged improvised comedy, he showed impatience as a
director with improvised method acting. In his first film The Delinquents
Tom Laughlin held up filming because Altman said “he thought he was “Brando and
Dean in one.” He also chafed at Warren Beatty's demands for repeated re-takes
in McCabe and Mrs Miller as Beatty searched for a maximum degree of
inwardness and wouldn't apply himself to the first take in anticipation of
re-takes (Wexman). The unevenness of
Altman's prolific and varied output resulted in questions about the consistency
of his work with actors.
Consistency wasn't a concern.
There are echoes of Cassavetes in his indication that the role of the script
was as “an indication of character and situation. What I do comes in over the
top of that.” He sometimes employed actors without allocating them written
parts expecting them to create their own roles, encouraging them to expand
their scripted parts during rehearsals or even write their own speeches in
advance (as in Nashville). Taking a similar option with locations
Rosenbaum also tells us that rather than scout them Altman sometimes chose to
encounter them only when he arrived with his crew. He allowed space during
shooting to be filled in at the editing and sound mixing stages.
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| Warren Beatty, McCabe & Mrs Miller |
Part 2 will look
at Altman's visual style and experiments with sound in his 70s films and his
own views on actors and performance.
[i] See career essay on
Robert Altman by Robert Self, Great Directors series, Senses of
Cinema sensesofcinema.com/2005/great-directors/altman/
[iii] Altman directed 35
features for cinema release from The Delinquents (1957) to A Prairie
Home Movie (2006) credited as a writer to 15 of them. He also directed 7
telemovies, 142 episodes for 34 tv series additionally contributing to about 20
as a writer. While box office records are not available for a number of his
features it seems fairly clear that only about 7 were commercially successful
on release: his first feature The Delinquents, MASH, Nashville,
Popeye (although below expectations), The Player, Gosford Park
and his last film A Prairie Home Companion. Source: IMDB.
[iv] As a crucial step
up in his career, MASH almost didn't come off for Altman. According to
Peter Biskind's account it was the rapport between Altman and his agent George
Litto who first identified the script as Altman material, and Litto's
negotiation of a deal with the hidebound Fox bureaucracy that landed the job for
Altman on favourable terms. Thereafter it was Altman's petulant hostility to
that bureaucracy (like a public pronouncement by him at a crucial time that
“Fox is going broke and I'm glad”) and their distrust of him that more than
once almost sunk the project for the director and his agent. As it was, the
deal originally negotiated was considerably weakened in the final contract,
most crucially the deletion of their 5% share in the the picture (see Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls pp 93-8).
[v] The quartet of commercial
and critical failures following Nashville were Buffalo Bill and the
Indians (1977), Quintet (79), A Perfect Couple and HealtH (80).
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