Robert Altman

by

Robert T. Self

Introduction

Robert Altman (b. 1925–d. 2006) had a directing career that stretched over fifty years, from the end of World War II to 2006. After spending his early adult life making industrial documentaries and directing television dramas, Altman finally broke into Hollywood at the age of forty-four. Thereafter, until his death at eighty-one, he proved to be one of the most prolific and experimental directors in American movie history. His iconoclastic narratives and his impressionistic cinematic style were widely denounced by movie audiences as confusing, boring, and pessimistic, but they were acclaimed by film fans and professionals as imaginative, original, and progressive. He told innovative fictions with dozens of characters (twenty-four in Nashville, forty-eight in A Wedding, and forty-four in Gosford Park) to reflect his belief that human life is connected in inexplicable, fortuitous, and impalpable ways that he called “subliminal reality.” He experimented with the causal structures and traditional themes of classical Hollywood genres. He explored the aesthetic limits of the zoom lens, pioneered multitrack sound recording, and consistently employed a lyrical film style. His films generally depicted characters estranged from themselves and from others and debilitated by the forces of the modern world. After Popeye in 1980, he worked independently and critically outside of the Hollywood production system in Paris and New York, in the academy, and in theater. He liked to claim that he made gloves in an industry that sold shoes. Nevertheless, the Motion Picture Academy nominated him five times for Best Director awards—for M*A*S*H (1970), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), and Gosford Park (2001), and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2004. Three of his films, M*A*S*H, Nashville, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) have been named by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry. Only M*A*S*H, however, at the beginning of his Hollywood career, enjoyed box-office success. Nonetheless, his thirty-three films in the last quarter of the century established him as one of the most important directors of American art cinema. Dozens of movie reviews accompanied the release of his films and reflected the inevitable division between hostility toward his films and praise for their genius. The critical studies referenced here largely reflect the fact that film critics and academic analysts, whether or not they liked it, treated his work with a serious appreciation for its importance in film history.

Book-Length Studies

The books listed here range from 1976, just six years after Altman’s first success with M*A*S*H, to 2002, when Altman was still to release four more movies before his death in 2006. These studies indicate the depth of appreciation that his work began to achieve early on, and that he would enjoy throughout his career. Feineman 1978, Karp 1981, and Kass 1978 reflect the popularity of the auteur approach to film study that was especially dominant during the first decade of Altman’s work; they are thin, eclectic, largely positive summations of the unusual styles, the generic reformulations, and the thematic values beginning to appear in his first films. Kagan 1982 reflects a developing academic concern with genre to examine Altman’s early fascination with generic innovation. O’Brien 1995 adds inception and production to the mix of critical interests in Altman’s films. Keyssar 1991 and Self 2002 are more academic than the others and mark a shift toward more formalist, narratological, and ideological concerns as these shape textual values. None of these studies focus in any depth on his work in television during the 1960s prior to his move to Hollywood, and no full-length study has yet been written that encompasses the whole of his work in feature films.

• Feineman, Neil. Persistence of Vision: The Films of Robert Altman. New York: Arno, 1978.

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  An early contribution to an appreciation of the beauty, complexity, and uniqueness of Altman’s films by attempting to characterize his worldview, his story structures, and his style.

• Kagan, Norman. American Skeptic: Robert Altman’s Genre-Commentary Films. Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian, 1982.

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  Study of Altman’s first ten feature films using a “Unified Genre Theory” to analyze how the films “comment” on traditional Hollywood genres. Compelling introduction by Raymond Durgnant on Altman as the “Man with No Genre.”

• Karp, Alan. The Films of Robert Altman. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981.

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  After a slim reference to modernism and the European art cinema, this book divides the early Altman films into three groups in order to illustrate the director’s development of open structures, his individual take on earlier genres and “myths,” and his use of dream motifs for content and style.

• Kass, Judith M. Robert Altman: American Innovator. New York: Popular Library, 1978.

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  Perhaps the best of these early book studies, it chronicles Altman’s career and covers everything from the director’s concern with emotional engagement, improvisatory acting, experimental style, oblique storytelling, genre surgery, contemporary cultural values, and filmmaking independence. A very readable summation of the general characteristics of the Altman filmmaking practice.

• Keyssar, Helene. Robert Altman’s America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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  One of the best studies of Altman’s work. Keyssar brings the insights of feminist, ideological, and formalist theory to bear on Altman’s film and examines the ways his famous working practices, story structures, and stylistic innovations work to critique authority, to expose the sham of American cultural values, and to implicate the audience in the construction of meaning.

• O’Brien, Daniel. Robert Altman, Hollywood Survivor. New York: Continuum, 1995.

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  This book conveys a very readable and well-researched chronology of Altman’s career, from his television work to the release of Prêt-à-Porter (1994). Each section contains a commentary on the film’s inception, a brief synopsis of the film, a general analysis of the story and style, and a summary of reviews and box-office success.

• Plecki, Gerald. Robert Altman. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

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  The book summarizes story lines, issues of production, and the critical reception of Altman’s films during the first decade of his Hollywood career, with general critical appreciations of how these films work.

• Self, Robert T. Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

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  Another academic attempt to define the Altman film using a concept from the director that refers to the subsurface interconnectedness of things apparently only random in life. The book investigates the whole range of Altman’s work to detail the films’ representation of fractured stories, fragile social identities, and the debilitating effects of show business.