Robert Altman Film by Film Thread

I believe Altman was fired from Countdown during production after execs saw the overlapping dialogue in dailies and assumed Altman was incompetent. He later claimed he was banned from the lot.

Of course, Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould tried to have him fired from MASH as well, as they couldn't understand his working methods. Thankfully, Fox was too busy with the production of Patton to fire Altman to pacify the actors.

 

one of my favorite aspects of his films!

 

shall we move on to Altman Movie #2 from 1969?
another little seen film:

That Cold Day in the Park




starring the amazing Sandy Dennis, Michael Burns and....Michael Murphy.

any fans?

 

ps
heres a cool look behind the scenes shot from cbc.

 

(bump)

anyone see That Cold Day in the Park?
it s a fascinating (sometimes creepy) film with Sandy Dennis


Altman Film #3
M*A*S*H* (1970)




Altman really comes into his own with this masterpiece. One of the best anti-war comedies ever. Any fans of MASH?

 

Compare the opening credits of Altman's M*A*S*H and the TV spin-off.

Both start with almost the exact same scene of helicopters bringing injured troops through the mountains. But the TV series resorts heavily to traditional establishing shot formulae. The helicopters move fast with a strong sense of direction. We cut to a medical van speeding along a track, soldiers running, again with that same firm sense of urgency. The camera lingers over the medical huts to tell us we are watching a field hospital drama. The men on the stretchers are out of focus, bloodless, largely obliterated by the star billings that roll over them.

Whereas Altman's original is much more disorienting. The helicopters drift in confusing directions and seem at times to be flying backwards. They deliver the injured but there is no sense of narrative momentum. Instead of watching the medical staff hurry the stretchers away, as per the TV series, the camera languidly zooms in on a bloodstained casualty and then languidly follows the helicopters away again, glimpsing the medical huts but declining to read them as a clue to the movie's contents. When we go back to the stretcher bearers and at last move in on the huts there is a lot of almost leisurely stumbling and fumbling and more blood stains. The perfect set-up to a seriously disorienting movie.

And so it continues. Altman uses widescreen brilliantly to displace normal movie conventions. The dialogue is usually taking place between characters in the middle distance, in front of rather graceful but distracting scenes of apparently random background movement. Often characters are filmed from the back, over their shoulders. The camera loves panning around smoothly at its own pace. On the rare occasions when we get a close-up it is just as likely to be a view of canteen cutlery (at 7:43, for example) as a star's face.

The way Altman chooses to film these scenes is perfectly suited to the crowded kind of ensemble playing and narrative incoherence that he wants to present. From what I've seen of his previous work I don't know how he got his technique together so cleverly in one go, though Fellini and Antonioni are clearly influences as well as alternative American 60s films. Whatever the secret, the actors took to it at once. Sutherland is particularly fine.