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'One of the most salient characteristics in Altman films is the narrative with a large cast of characters. From MASH to Gosford Park his films repeatedly set numerous stories in motion – with so many actors that it’s hard to count them: 40 in Nashville, 48 in A Wedding, another 40 in Short Cuts, over 60 in both Prêt-à-Porter and The Player, with many “playing themselves”. In these films he paints large canvases with motion that results more from the edited interconnections among scenes in different stories than from the logic of any overall story development. Altman has consistently expressed his hostility to narrative causality and closure, and his films dramatically display an antipathy to straightforward, clearly delineated, and causally logical narratives. An analysis, for instance, of the scenes cut from Gosford Park reveals that shots and scenes potentially explaining character behaviour and motive were systematically removed from the final cut of the film. Throughout his career Altman has relegated motivation to the “subliminal reality” of conflicting, indeterminate, vague, inexpressible characterological desire. We look for explanation of human action, he says, “But there doesn’t have to be one”. These films ultimately asked to be read not as realistic fictions but as expressive portraits and murals of modern life.
'On one hand, these multiply plotted films become more like reality, where lives intersect in random, chance and discontinuous ways without apparent reasons. Narrative coherence gives way to fragmentary puzzles. On the other hand, Altman has also regularly stated his craft to be that of a painter or a musician. Individual characters, then, bits and pieces of action, interact within the spaces and across the times of his films like tonal signatures or pigments of paint. Character motive, personal relationships, causal behaviour become ambiguous, diffuse, implicit.
'A central characteristic of the art cinema is its liberation of the visual and spatial systems of film from the logical system of narrative. Altman’s large casts and diffuse stories actively assist in this process where he says that story itself asks to be read in 3 Women (1977) like a dream, in Kansas City like jazz, in The Company like a pas de deux, in Gosford Park like a tapestry. The editing rhythm of McCabe & Mrs. Miller follows from the musical rhythm of the Leonard Cohen’s music subsequently used on the sound track. Vincent and Theo seems to be motivated by a desire to follow the trail of these two bothers in order that the director can paint with his camera the same people and places of Van Gogh’s paintings. Consequently, part of the difficulty in following the complex play of stories in Altman’s films is their modernist presumption that meaning emerges from the simultaneous perception of connections among images and phrases in space that have no consecutive relationship to each other in time. Each of the 24 roles in Nashville is a colour whose meaning resides in its proximity to adjacent colours and its various intensities within the figure the film makes. Similarly the multiple fragments in Short Cuts coalesce ultimately not just as the threads of disrupted stories but as the musical accompaniment to the classical, new age, and jazz compositions that shape the whole film.
'Altman’s films strikingly illustrate that the art cinema is a poetic as well as a narrative art. The sombre palette of gold and green in Images (1972); the restless, sensuous and ambiguous zoom and pan shots in Nashville and 3 Women; the pointillistic final sequence in the blizzard in McCabe and Mrs. Miller; the exhilarating colour and music of fashion in Prêt-à-Porter, the compulsive repetition of red and black throughout The Gingerbread Man), the stunning contrast of primary colours during the ballet performances with the honey-brown spaces of rehearsal and life in The Company– these qualities reflect the eye of a painter. Altman has consistently asserted that the goal of his films is an emotional rather than an intellectual effect: "I look at film as closer to a painting or a piece of music; it’s an impression… an impression of character and total atmosphere… The attempt is to enlist an audience emotionally, not intellectually."
'Narrative hardly disappears in Altman’s film, despite his self-description as a painter. In another aspect of the art cinema, Altman’s film aggressively interrogate popular narrative genres, almost as though he has been involved in a research and development project systematically to revise Hollywood’s major product lines. Images is a psychological thriller. MASH is a combat film. The Long Goodbye is a hard-boiled detective film. Nashville is a musical. McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill are westerns. Quintet is science fiction. A Perfect Couple and Popeye are musical comedy romances. The Gingerbread Man is film noir. These well-known narrative forms provide the director platforms from which to display other concerns about the nature of human behaviour and its cinematic observation. Their stories seldom provide the context for significant, heroic action; rather they reveal spaces that enclose and forces that act upon a multiplicity of selves. Graphic and rhythmic dimensions of editing and cinematography frequently come unstuck from generic logic. Story moves psychologically from apparent external to obscure internal motivation. Plot becomes a project open-ended, ironic and ambiguous. Unfamiliar and unusual actors play against the star system, and stars play against their box-office personas. The innovative expressivity of the auteur director produces a metaphoric, often moody and contradictory, generally oblique discourse rather than the effaced zero-degree of style in the classical narrative cinema.'-- Senses of Cinema
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Stills
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Further
Robert Altman @ IMDb
Robert Altman @ The Criterion Collection
Books on Robert Altman
Robert Altman interviewed @ BOMB Magazine
Podcast: Robert Altman's son Michael talks about him
'10 Robert Altman Films You May Not Know'
'Home Movies: Robert Altman, Hollywood Renegade'
'6 Filmmaking Tips From Robert Altman'
'How Robert Altman turned Popeye into an Altman movie'
Fuck Yeah Robert Altman
'Revisiting the Strange and Wonderful Soundtrack to Robert Altman's Nashville'
Martin Scorcese on Robert Altman
'Robert Altman: The Hollywood Interview'
'What I've Learned: Robert Altman'
'Ronee Blakley Looks Back at Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, "Nashville"'
'The Robert Altman film Altman never wanted you to see'
'"We don't like the twins" - On Robert Altman's 3 Women'
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Extras
Robert Altman talks about movie stuff
Independent Focus with Robert Altman
Robert Altman on RASHOMON by Kurosawa
Cinefile : Robert Altman Parts 1 - 3 (1996)
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Interview
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You had to hustle particularly hard during the '80s...
Robert Altman: It appears that way to you and to most people, but that was a very creative time for me. I did three or four theatre pieces with no screenplays. Making stage adaptations like Streamers and Come Back To The Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was experimental. It was fun. For me, it was a time of success.
Yet people dismiss that period, overlooking the fact that your filmed plays are very cinematic.
RA: Right. I made them like movies, but they took place in one space. I don't understand why people say you have to open a stage play up.
Is it a common misperception that you turned to these small-scale theatre pieces because the critical failure of Popeye burned you?
RA: I make no apologies for Popeye. Behind M*A*S*H, it's my biggest hit. It got maligned by the critics because it wasn't Superman. It wasn't about special effects and it wasn't made for 14-year-old boys. The majority of films are made for 14-year-old boys; I don't know where they get the eight bucks to get in. It's hush money from the parents.
You'd never worked with a major star until McCabe & Mrs Miller. So how did you handle Warren Beatty?
RA: Well, he was difficult. Warren was a control freak who was used to being in charge. I woke up one morning and it was snowing, much like today, so I said, "Hey, let's do so-and-so." Warren refused to come out of his dressing room. He said, "Well, by the time we get the shots, this is all going to be gone and we'll have to redo it." I said, "We've nothing else to do. Let's just try it." It snowed for 11 straight days and we got our whole final scene.
Beatty's always been renowned for demanding multiple takes. You shoot on the hoof. Did that cause any problems?
RA: You bet. Take the scene where McCabe is drunk and talking to himself. We did about seven takes and I said, "Okay, that's great." He said, "I want to do another one." So we did 12 or 13 takes. He said, "I want to do some more." I said, "Well, I'm going to bed because I've got an early call tomorrow." I left him with Tommy Thompson, my second-unit director. They shot 10 more [laughs].
You've always tried to flip Hollywood convention. Is that why you cut away from the love scene between Beatty and Julie Christie? After all, every studio exec wants "a little sex"...
RA: It wasn't something I was interested in showing. Sex is very private. You don't call up the neighbours and say, "Hey, Sally and I are gonna be at it tonight. Bring a chair over and sit and watch us!"
McCabe deconstructed the Western. The Long Goodbye did much the same for the detective story. Discuss...
RA: Everybody's seen all those films. I like them to see my film and go, "Oh, we're going to see another one of those…" Then I say, "No, you're not."
Naturally, you pissed off the Raymond Chandler purists. Did you expect the backlash?
RA: The purists said I didn't do what Chandler did. I never intended to. What's the point of a rehash? And when people say that Elliott Gould is not a good Philip Marlowe, they're not talking about Philip Marlowe. They're talking about Humphrey Bogart.
Your movies are renowned for their use of overlapping dialogue...
RA: I started that with M*A*S*H and continued it with McCabe & Mrs Miller. Eventually, on California Split, we made the first eight-track, so I had stuff going down on different tracks. Everybody was miked. On Gosford Park, I had 64 tracks!
How do you feel about the adjective 'Altmanesque'? It's now applied to any multi-layered movie with an ensemble cast...
RA: I don't know what "Altmanesque" means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it. I mean, Paul Thomas Anderson openly said to me, "All I'm doing is ripping you off." But that kid Anderson is really, really talented. He's a real artist, our best hope.
Filmmaking's changed so much since your arrival in the late '60s. Any other new voices you admire?
RA: I don't know how Fernando Meirelles made City Of God. It's so courageous, so truthful. I think it's the best picture I've ever seen - all I could think of was Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle Of Algiers. I also liked Sofia Coppola's film, Lost In Translation. It's all about nothing but it's beautifully done. I'd rather watch a movie like that than Cold Mountain. For Christ's sake, I've seen that picture about 50 times before. There's nothing there that interests me.
You were 43 when you made Countdown. You'd served on bombers during World War Two. Does that life experience help the work?
RA: It all goes in.
So how do you feel about the new wave of MTV directors? Do you agree with Fred Ward's character in The Player: their movies are just "Cut, cut, cut"?
RA: They serve their art as they see fit.
Do you think that the '70s could have been cinema's last Golden Age?
RA: These things are on a cycle, but it'll probably be the last Golden Age in my lifetime. Back then, the decisions had gone from studio executives to the artists. I remember doing Brewster McCloud for some guy, I forget his name, who had just taken over MGM. It was an outrageous film about a boy who wanted to fly. This guy didn't know what the fuck I was talking about, but he went ahead and let me make it anyway.
Why have so many of your peers burned out?
RA: Well, I don't think they've dried up, but it's easy to get into a groove or a rut. I mean, I was offered millions - millions - of dollars to do a M*A*S*H sequel… But why would I do that? It was the same with Short Cuts and Nashville. I won't be restricted. Just look what happens every time some Mexican guy goes out and makes a great film for $65,000. They bring him in, give him $65 million and Ben Affleck. He falls on his face.
Do you think your reputation as a maverick could be partly responsible for the Oscar missing from your trophy cabinet?
RA: They'll never give me an Oscar. And I sincerely, honestly don't care. I always turn up when I'm nominated and it would be nice to get one, but to win one would be bad luck. It comes with too much expectation. It would be the end.
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14 of Robert Altman's 41 films
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That Cold Day in the Park (1969)
'By 1969, Robert Altman was a prolific director of episodic television, craving a transition to feature filmmaking, but facing a steep climb toward his goal. His first few feature outings (the 1957 independent feature The Delinquents, a documentary about James Dean from the same year, and the 1968 space thriller Countdown), had not sufficiently captured the imaginations of audiences or the film industry to sustain a feature career. That Cold Day in the Park represented a daring gambit in this context: quiet and cryptic, it displayed Altman’s iconoclastic fascinations: a sensitivity to schisms within normalcy, a fascination with female subjectivity, and the construction of atmospheres as expressive of psychological states. Par for the course, the film was received with ambivalence and disdain by many critics, and did not meet with commercial success; hardly the calling card that Altman needed.'-- UCLA Film Archive
Excerpt
Behind the scenes
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Brewster McCloud (1970)
'Brewster McCloud is more complex and more difficult than MASH. For one thing, we don't have the initial orientation we had in MASH, where we knew we were in the Army and we knew what the uniforms stood for and what was going on in the operating room. Those hooks helped us unsort the narrative. Brewster may not even have a narrative. If you want me to explain what Brewster is about. I'm not sure it's about anything. I imagine you could extract a subject from it, and I'll try that the next time I see it. But I wonder if the movie isn't primarily style; if Altman doesn't have a personal sense of humor and wants his directing style to reflect it. One could, of course, get into a deep thing about birds and wings and freedom, but why?'-- Roger Ebert
The entire film
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
'Ostensibly an anti-Western that eschewed the romanticism of John Ford, Altman’s film remained indebted to Howard Hawks for its subdued, atmospheric interior lighting (photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, who went on to shoot Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and is still working as he approaches 84), reminiscent of the kerosene-lit sets of Hawks’s El Dorado. (Altman also owes something to Hawks for his experimental use of multilayered soundtracks, but also to Ford for his use of songs, in this case those of Leonard Cohen.) This contrasts markedly with the long climax, shot in snowy streets in broad daylight. As I wrote in my 1976 book on Westerns, McCabe is photographed “as though it were underwater…. Its consistent use of subdued colors is ultimately rather lovely in its ugliness. Altman insists on the smells, dirt, and grossness of the frontier….” I went on to say that the death of Beatty’s “seedy entrepreneur…argues persuasively that not only is there no room left for a Western hero, but there isn’t even room for an anti-hero.” In a sense, Beatty’s McCabe is the perfect surrogate for Altman, possessed (sometimes blindly) by indefatigable ambition.'-- MoMA
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Finale
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Images (1972)
'Sandwiched between two of his most celebrated artistic triumphs (McCabe and Mrs. Miller on one side, The Long Goodbye on the other), Images is something of a doodle – an intense, psychosexual thriller in the vein of Repulsion or Don't Look Now (released the following year) – but a wildly entertaining, impressively acted doodle nonetheless. The movie centers around (and is narrated by, in some of Altman's very best writing) Cathryn (Susannah York), a wealthy children's book author. One night at their home (which looks like a quasi-futuristic hobbit hole, in the way only '70s architecture and design can), Cathryn receives a series of disturbing phone calls indicating that her husband (Rene Auberjonois) is having an affair. When he returns home she confronts him, and he seemingly changes into another man altogether. (In one dizzyingly impressive shot the camera starts on York talking to the other man, played by Marcel Bozzuffi, who suddenly transforms into Auberjonois. The choreography boggles the mind.) Her husband suggests that they retreat to a cabin in the countryside, which is never a great idea, and the madness and intensity only escalates, with Cathryn tempted by adultery and plagued with visions of the mystery man and her own devilish doppelganger. Images is embroidered with pervasive weirdness – everything from the driving gloves Auberjonois is always wearing to sequences later in the movie when a rotting corpse lies on the kitchen floor, more a nuisance than anything else. In many ways a kind of companion piece to the similarly dreamlike 3 Women, Images is anchored by an utterly fearless, compulsively watchable performance by York (she bares body and soul) and Altman's razor-sharp screenplay.'-- Indiewire
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The Long Goodbye (1973)
'There’s an unmistakable sense of nostalgia that permeates Robert Altman’s seldom-seen 1973 neo-noir The Long Goodbye, an air of reminiscence highlighted by the film’s title track, a nifty, pliable, lovelorn little number composed by John Williams and Johnny Mercer that gets incorporated endlessly throughout the movie, evoking sporadic familiarity, even though we rarely hear the same version twice. It transforms itself, from scene-to-scene, into a flimsy piece of supermarket Muzak, an ivory-tickled barroom ditty, even a castanet-laden flamenco. It’s a caressing torch ballad one moment and a marching band’s funeral hymn the next. The song, in all its reimagined incarnations, continually threatens to embed itself into the viewer’s mind, but just as quickly eludes any tighter hold. It’s as though the film, in its own increasingly weary, tumbledown sort of way, is nostalgic for the tune, longing for something that comes back but is never the same.'-- The Film Experience
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Excerpt
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Thieves Like Us (1974)
'Keith Carradine is good looking and young and Shelley Duvall is appealingly strange and wan. During a scene where she emerges naked from the bath and climbs into bed with him, it's sensual and odd, because it doesn't play out with the predictable rhythm of a love scene. Altman understands that what makes Duvall attractive is her otherworldliness, and her dialogue rolls along like she's visiting from another planet, only vaguely curious of the details in our world because she has other things to do. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman found an earthiness in Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, two stars transformed into character types. Thieves Like Us is all character. Altman shows sensitivity to these outsiders, without false sentiment or even commentary. He watches from the sidelines, with a taste for irony—if you linger on an Altman wide shot long enough, without punctuation marks for action, it all becomes a little funny. These bank robber movies all end the same way: badly for our heroes. And we know this going in, so spending two hours in the company of these delightfully strange birds is, in a word, affecting. The world of Thieves Like Us is beautiful and strange, in all its stunning everydayness.'-- Slant Magazine
Excerpt
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California Split (1974)
'Robert Altman’s most overlooked gem, California Split charts the friendship of two inveterate gamblers, Elliott Gould’s devil-may-care rabble-rouser and George Segal’s writer, as they wend their way through a series of casino misadventures. Theirs is a bond first forged over a game of poker in which Segal covers for Gould’s con and—after they properly meet-cute at a bar, drunkenly failing to name all seven of Snow White’s dwarfs—suffer a parking lot beat down for their earlier swindle. It’s a bromance predicated on a shared addiction to the thrill of the high-stakes win, and Altman dramatizes their union with his usual overlapping-dialogue acuteness. Conversations flow so naturally and messily that the film exudes a ragamuffin charm, bolstered by the director’s canny use of quick cutaways and evocative framing.'-- The AV Club
Excerpt
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Nashville (1975)
'What more is there to say about Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus Nashville? I mean really, it’s been held as a benchmark of not only 1970s cinema but American cinema as a whole since its release, and before the movie even came out it had critical luminaries like the one-and-only Pauline Kael throwing platitudes left and right at it from her review’s first paragraph with whoppers like “I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you.” As hyperbolic as that seems it’s an appropriately excessive statement for a fittingly excessive movie—that has twenty-four main characters and a nebulous-at-best plot, mind you—and one that I happen to pretty much agree with. Nashville is the type of movie that covers you like some sort of a cinematic blanket, never smothering you or your emotions but swaddling them enough in its grasp until it pulls itself knowingly away from you in its jarring grand finale. It is a singular film from a singular director.'-- Criterion Cast
Trailer
Excerpt
Final scene
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Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976)
'Robert Altman was often ahead of his time--once at the cost of being behind himself. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, a snorting exposé of the U.S. predilection for buying into heroic myths, opened on July 4, 1976. Clearly the film was positioned as the ultimate bicentennial event, Altman-style. But Altman had already delivered that a year earlier: the splendiferous, deeply disenchanted yet exhilarating Nashville. Both Nashville and Buffalo Bill are films about America-as-show business, hucksterism, and the rare miracle of performance. But everything Altman got so thrillingly right in Nashville, which teems with life and mystery and widescreen dynamism, came out flatfooted and obvious in Buffalo Bill, a cramped, smirky inside joke that ends up being on the joker. The setting is the base camp for Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, where the blustering Indian fighter of legend is gearing up for his latest national tour. Apart from sharpshooter Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and her great friend, the Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), the show is populated by phonies and opportunists. Biggest phony of all is Cody (Paul Newman), whose fame has been based more on the penny-dreadful scribblings of Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster) than on any real accomplishments; even his long blond tresses are fake. Altman and cowriter Alan Rudolph (working from a play by Arthur Kopit) thump their insights about the Establishment's feet of clay as if they were breaking-news bulletins instead of countercultural clichés. Only the occasional ineffably mysterious Altman zoom shot offers relief.'-- Richard T. Jameson
Trailer
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3 Women (1977)
'When asked whether he considers himself an “auteur” director, Altman has said he is to some degree a primary creator, in the sense implied by that term, and to some degree a “filter,” considering ideas offered by others as filmmaking proceeds. For a deeply personal project like 3 Women, his own instincts clearly take first place. Yet his dream would not have been effectively realized if he hadn’t been able to tune many collaborators in to his own intuitive wavelengths. This in itself makes 3 Women a quintessential specimen of Altman cinema, propelled by evanescent reveries of his own and inventive contributions from cast and crew. In the end, 3 Women emerged as such a seamless weave of image, sound, story, and character that no plot summary can do it justice. Ideally, it should be watched and pondered more than once, since many moviegoers find the film so utterly outside the cinematic frameworks they’re familiar with that they wonder if its tenuous narrative (especially the deliberately indefinite ending) has passed them by, or isn’t really there in the first place.'-- David Sterritt
Trailer 1
Trailer 2
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A Wedding (1978)
'When it was first released A Wedding received a cooler reception than director Robert Altman was used to with previous films Nashville and 3 Women. It is frenetic and confusing with Altman himself confessing, "It probably had too many characters and it gets a little unwieldy." With no fewer than 48 significant speaking parts, that was something of an understatement. However, even with its flaws, this is one of Altman's funniest and most ebullient films. Ostensibly Robert Altman's aim in this 1978 comic free-for-all was to top his own Nashville by doubling his cast of leading players from 24 to 48. The film concentrates on the aftermath of an upscale Chicagoland wedding, and it certainly has its moments. But the facileness of this "exposé" of the upper middle class adds up to a lot of cheap shots--watchable enough, but considerably less than the sum of its parts. Among the 48: Carol Burnett, Desi Arnaz Jr., Amy Stryker, Vittorio Gassman, Geraldine Chaplin, Mia Farrow, Paul Dooley, Lillian Gish, Lauren Hutton, John Cromwell, Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Dina Merrill, Nina Van Pallandt, John Considine, and Viveca Lindfors.'-- Jonathan Rosenbaum
Trailer
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Quintet (1979)
'In the year 1979, director Robert Altman teamed with star Paul Newman to present one of the bleakest post-apocalyptic and dystopian cinematic visions ever forged, the wintry Quintet. Set well into a fictional future ice age of devastating "global cooling,"Quintet was not received warmly by either film critics or audiences at the time of the film's theatrical release, and that perception has remained largely unchanged today. Indeed, Quintet is not an easy or particularly fun film to experience. The narrative moves at an almost glacial pace and the action features long periods of bracing, uncomfortable silence. In addition to these qualities, Altman's feature boasts a kind of overt "icy" visual palette, with out-of-focus "cold" atmosphere encroaching visibly on the four corners of the frame. This unique, misty canvas is actually an ideal reflection of the film's existential crisis: that mankind is being suffocated spiritually and physically by the re-glaciation of all corners of the planet. For some viewers, this misty, frost-bitten visual presentation will add immeasurably to the creeping sense of bleakness and claustrophobia Altman toils so assiduously to generate. For others, the effect may only serve to annoy or even distance one from the action on-screen.'-- John Kenneth Muir
Trailer
Excerpt
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Popeye (1980)
'I first watched Altman’s comic-strip musical in a Milwaukee cinema within a few weeks of my sixth birthday, in December 1980. Baffled and bored by it at the time, I have more distinct memories of the pizza dinner my family shared afterward. But viewed again after Altman’s death, Popeye stands as a worthy entry in the director’s filmography for its charm, its gently countercultural spirit, and its performance by Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, the role—as so many critics noted—she was born to play. Remarkably faithful to the look, rhythm, and spirit of E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theater comic strips, in which the character originally appeared, Popeye, like its antecedents Dick Tracy and Sin City, stands as a testament to the challenges—and rewards—of translating a comic kit and caboodle to film.'-- The Believer
Trailer
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Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
'The first of Robert Altman’s adaptations of stage plays introduced his admirably rigorous, enormously fertile approach to the question of turning theatre into something properly cinematic. Ed Graczyk’s play depicts the 1975 reunion, two decades after James Dean’s death in the Texan desert nearby, of a group of women who used to be members of his fan club; as they reminisce about the past and reflect on the present, various truths emerge to sometimes comic, sometimes painful effect. Crucially, Altman never ‘opens out’ the action but uses the many sightlines provided both by his characteristically prowling camera and by a mirror on the wall of his single dime-store set to reveal and illuminate the cracks in the masks of his garrulous characters. And the performances of his almost entirely female cast are uniformly superb – Cher’s, especially, being a revelation.'-- Bfi
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Excerpt
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Streamers (1983)
'The film's flaws are more than a little obvious—and likely derived in large part from the play. For all the director's zooming in and shooting through windows and into mirrors, the production feels hopelessly stagy, but given the one-room setting and its magnifying of the screenplay's inherent claustrophobia, this staginess actually works in the film's favor. Rather, especially in the retrospect of 27 (film) or 35 (play) years, Streamers's discussions of race and sexuality don't hold up particularly well, their effect dissipated by a certain quaintness in the play's understanding of homosexuality, by Rabe's desire to pack as much socially relevant material into his work as it'll take, and by Altman's penchant for tinting his minority characters (Richie, Carlyle) with ugly stereotyped traits. But what elevates the film above a dated topical discussion is Altman's imagining of the army barracks as a hothouse environment where tensions and fears play out in oddly manic outbursts—and his direction of his actors accordingly. The filmmaker, following Rabe, conceives of the army base as a testing ground for the American experiment, where a diverse group of people is forced to come together in a spirit of mutual beneficence. In the wake of Vietnam (or Reagan), however, such an experiment must result in failure, so that, while Altman allows for moments of kindness between the characters, the final result can only be a meltdown as potentially apocalyptic as it is inevitable.'-- Slant Magazine
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Yep re: everything you said about Tosh. I'll alert Yury to Swinton's fashion turn, thanks. Everyone, David Ehrenstein says, 'Attention everyone in the L.A. area. Tomorrow at 5 pm at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills, Walter Reuben's The David Whiting Story or The Ceasar Romero Joke will be screening. Don't miss it.' What is that? ** Tosh Berman, Hey. Glad you thought it was okay. Such a pleasure. Yeah, the moving thing is sad and irksome 'cos getting a place here when you're not a legal resident and have no conventional job/income is a difficult process, but I'm definitely staying in Paris. I'll start looking as soon as I hit two immediate deadlines. Hopefully, it'll be okay. I have good luck, generally, Thank you, Tosh. ** Wolf, Wolf! Buddy! MoFo! Very cool about the job. Intense, super-interesting, cool-ass ... what a trio of adjectives. Congrats! Iceland was even far more amazing than you always told me. Un-fucking-believable. Mindblown, yes, by pretty much every inch of everything we saw, which was quite a lot, I guess. 13 days' worth. Insane. Pix, yeah, I have to get some from Zac. He took 90% of the images. I'll try. I put 6 Iceland pix up on my FB page if you want to sneak in there for a moment. ** Keaton, Hi. Art trip's a good trip. Mostly. McCollum, yes. I hate Kiefer's stuff, as you surely know. Monochrome is very crush-worthy. Oh, I see, cool, re: the theory dudes. I find Zizek so uninteresting. He's like the Bono or, I don't know, Radiohead of theory or something. Jung's castle? No, I know nothing. I'll hunt it down today, you bet. Hi! ** Steevee, Thanks, Steve. I have to move early next year. Not sure of when exactly, but I'll need to start hunting a new place soon. Cool about your interview. Everyone, Steevee interviews Ana Lily Amirpour, director of the new, hugely liked horror/art film 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'here. Nice to hear that about the Wiseman. And not surprised to hear that about the Palahniuk. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. Yeah, I always or mostly think change is good, so I'm going to try to forefront that pov and activate my objective side. Thanks for reading my sluts and for starting my junior God, man. Immortality has been one of my life's dreams since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, so I've been all set for that state for ages. Well, I would do an evolving version of what I do now, I suppose. Unless immortality bestows other magical powers or something. Does it? That would be cool. Yeah, I just imagine continuing everything as is with the world's changing input. What would you do were you to last forever? ** Etc etc etc, Hey. Thanks for the moving sympathies. Yeah, I wish Paris landlords were clawing to rent to American ex-pat artist types, but, no, they just want civil, moneyed-up people, and I'm kind of civil, but moneyed-up, not so much. LA talk rules. I wouldn't trade my mumbly diction for the world, I don't think. Sure, Pynchon's awesome. I like maximalists. I feel like experimental maximalism is on the rise or something, at least in the States. 'Witz' was good, but I don't like that Cohen guy much. Still haven't cracked Tom McCarthy, but I've got one of his things here. No, the incidental-seeming structure of the Godard excited me a lot. Formally, it's, like, the most inspiring thing I've seen in ages. It's making me think about narrative structure and spacial issues in fiction really intently. And the 3D was like a call-to-arms or something. No, it blew me away, top to bottom. I hope everything is awesome with you, today and otherwise. ** Rewritedept, Oops, shit, sorry things have returned to the less than burning light at the end of tunnel-like. Mm, yeah, don't like to hear suicide talk. Get that shit out of the equation instantaneously, please. And I hope you get reconnected just as instantaneously. What will it take? Whatever it is, take it. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, man, thank you a huge ton for the post! Yes, the timing couldn't possibly have been better. I'll put it together today and, unless you hear otherwise from me, it'll launch on this coming Saturday. I'm bummed by how little fiction I've managed to write this year too, but I just -- at least initially -- nailed down the theater piece text, so, barring heavy rewrites ordered by Gisele, I can finally get back into my capitol N novel now. Thank you, thank you again! ** Magick mike, Hey, Mike! Really, really great to see you! And very belated congrats about the forthcoming CCM book! That news made me so happy! And awesome, needless to say, about your new book! I'll score one today before it's history. Everyone, M. Kitchell aka d.l. Magic Mike is one of the best writers of prose, poetry, fiction, and etc. we've got in this world today, and he has just today released a new tome through his exquisite Solar Luxuriance press, and it'll sell out lickety-split for sure, so I extremely encourage you to get yourself a copy today or as soon as possible. It's called 'Apart From', and you can get it here. Awesomeness itself, Mike! Thank you! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Cool about finding 'Found'. I'll follow your lead. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. Me too. I'll go read that linked article as soon as I get a chance today, thank you. Nice, itchy Art101 news. ** Kier, Welcome home, pal. Man, it sounds like you had the most fun and dramatic and poetic and mystical time. That's so, so great! Wow, everything! So sweet! Yeah, the need to move, ugh, but it'll be okay, I guess. I don't know long the cycle will be yet. I'm still planning. 2 for sure but that's not a cycle-length number. I'm imagining and initially devising what could be a 3rd novel. We'll see, but, no, I don't know how many yet. No name for it yet, no. My weekend was mostly taken up by working on the new theater piece, but I finished at least a draft solid enough to send to Gisele for her thoughts and approval yesterday. She's reading it, and then we'll meet this week to see if I need to do more work on it. Anyway, that was at least an initial relief, but it did occupy most of my time. Being stuck here, I mostly talked to people on the phone and made plans. Seeing this art world guy who wants to talk to me about something this morning. My LA friends Francesca and Eddy are in town, and I'll see them. I'm gonna hang with Zac and see art and eat or something today. Tomorrow is the opening of the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Pompidou, and I'm not a big Koons fan, for sure, but Zac and I are going to the opening for kicks. I really didn't do hardly anything other than work on/finish the theater piece text. Everything else has blurred. But hopefully my days will become more active and noteworthy starting today. How did you spend the first day after your glorious getaway? ** Tomáš, Wow, hi, Tomáš! How are you? I haven't seen in, like, a million years. 'The Marbled Swarm' has had a very difficult French birth. It was supposed to have come out last year. Then it was supposed to have come out this year. A translator translated it, and my publisher POL didn't like the translation and rejected it. Then a second translator worked on translating it for almost a year and finally gave up. I guess it's really, really hard to translate. Now a third translator is working on it. I guess if the third translator can manage the job, it will finally come out next year sometime. It's been a big mess. ** Misanthrope, You'd eat Rewritedept, interesting. And he was feeling suicidal this weekend, so he might just let you do it. Cannibalistic love birds, you two. Good, fingers crossed, that you've convinced his mom to do the logical thing. Whew. Love to you, bud. ** Hyemin kim, Hi, there! How are you? It's really good to see you! I've been wondering how you are given all the dramatic, scary news about Buffalo's massive snowfall. Has it affected you? My trip was sublime, really, amazing. Well, I broke three ribs while I was there, but that didn't even crease the sublimity. ** MANCY, Hi, man! It was so great to get to see the video of you Mark performing at his launch! Really glad you dug Emitt Rhodes. There's definitely stuff there. And, yeah, I saw that we're friended-up at FB now. I'm looking forward to whatever benefits that status infers. Won't be a lot from my end other than blog links. I get shy around there. ** Sickly, Sweet and awesome and cool about the Beau Rice. He wrote me a really nice note. Ha ha, I don't know how you found that 800 Euro a month, 3-bedroom place, but either there's something seriously wrong with it or it's located in Paris's far-flung boonies, I would guess. The rental situation here is really hard, actually. But, I don't know, I haven't started hunting yet so who really knows? ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff, Ha ha, awesome suggested post theme. I don't know if I could find 10 edible d.l.s. Nothing against you guys, I'm just a really, really picky eater in my cannibal fantasies. I'm hoping I can catch that Marjorie Cameron show at MoCA when I get to LA, but I guess it's pretty unlikely. Interesting thing, hers. Have a splendid day! ** Okay, I've never done a Robert Altman thing here, and I thought I should. Presto. See you tomorrow.