The Porous Frame: Visual Style in Robert Altman’s 1970s Films

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Published in A. Danks (ed.), The Robert Altman Companion, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 119-145.

The Porous Frame

Visual Style in Altman’s 1970s Films

Hamish Ford

Introduction – Framing authorship

This chapter explores the ways Robert Altman’s 1970s cinema manipulates, utilizes, deconstructs and re-presents the materiality of celluloid. It examines, in the process, how the director’s work in this era results in a distinctive visual style that both takes in and significantly transcends any given film’s textual model, be it a Hollywood-based genre piece or European-influenced “art film.”

Altman’s particular use of updated audiovisual technology helped to forge a distinct authorial signature during this period. In particular, his highly prominent use of the zoom lens and very wide 2.35:1 frame – combined with hidden radio microphones that enabled the director’s famous “deep focus” overlapping dialogue – diminished the necessity of “blocking” for cinematographers, camera operators and actors. Those in front of the lens thereby enjoyed relatively unrestricted front-to-back and lateral bodily movement within the available space, while the team behind the camera forged images with equivalent freedom. The result is a strikingly flexible and inherently unstable image that works to define and emphasize cinema in and as process, rather than finished product. The most tangible outcome of this dynamic – as I will explore ahead, operating on “both sides of the screen” – is an almost constantly shifting, porous frame. Its most obvious incarnation occurs, perhaps, where what “classical” film language calls establishing or master shots in Altman’s cinema can often become medium shots or close-ups, and vice versa. The viewer is confronted by an image where the proximity of the primary subjects in relation to the camera can never be assumed. Yet this enlarged freedom, initially at least, tends to work against the kind of

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distinct cinematic style and “vision” celebrated in the work of other filmmakers marked by carefully composed images forged via fastidious lighting set-ups, precise framing and the careful control of mise en scène. With Altman’s cinema, instead, we often get rather “flat” lighting seemingly imported from budget-conscious television practice that is typically combined with an overall flattened depth of field resulting from the camera being kept back from the action and the telephoto lens used to shift to a closer shot with or without a cut. Altman’s cinema, then, is ultimately a rather paradoxical mix. It is remarkably “free” yet often denuded of traditionally affirmed markers of style. At the same time it institutes a new set of restrictions out of which an updated, yet historically embedded, set of stylistic coordinates is established. Strikingly, this procedure itself works against many of the well-known advantages offered by the technical devices that define Altman’s style. While some foregrounding of the zoom was already familiar from previous TV production, documentary cinema and various 1960s “new wave” films, with the latter also often featuring unusual applications of different widescreen ratios, Altman’s idiosyncratic employment of these technical innovations highlights the construction of the image as well as its “staging.” Beyond the requirement of lighting set-ups favoring a camera commonly situated at a distance from the action, but optically unrestrained thanks to the zoom lens operating in combination with selective lateral panning and tracking movement, Altman limits his options in strikingly willful ways by adapting such techniques counterintuitively. One notable result of such overt formal foregrounding – especially for films produced largely within a Hollywood context – is a quietly recalcitrant attitude towards the dominance of narrative and the traditionally subservient role of the image in its delivery. No matter whether designated genre pieces like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973), European “art cinema”-influenced films such as Images (1972) and 3 Women (1977), or simply “Altman-style” large-cast episodic narrative extravaganzas as exemplified by Nashville (1975) and A Wedding (1978), the secret driver of Altman’s 1970s work is a sustained exploration of cinematic texture as highlighted and exercised by the filmmaker’s favored tools of image capture and manipulation. This cinema exhibits a primary interest in the material “stuff” and numerous permutations of film’s expressive potential, played out in the process of exploring diverse textual “models” ranging from the Hollywood Western to Ingmar Bergman-influenced modernist chamber drama. Altman scholars and fans frequently assert that while his cinema is characterized by particular formal emphases it doesn’t tip over into outright abstraction. Yet this is not clear-cut. The loose presence of narratives and characters presented within the context of a given genre or textual tradition, combined with frequently strong aesthetic elements associated with documentary and realist cinema, far from precludes the intrusion of abstraction into the visual field at key moments. In fact, even where fictional interests appear more clearly in play, the camera’s tendency seems to draw us further into the image. Although an

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enlargement of detail might appear to offer a more intimate and knowledgeable account of a particular human subject, object or surface, and thereby access to a given film’s diegetic world and our understanding of it, Altman’s often-ubiquitous zooms usually give us the exact opposite. At the end of a shot, scene, “act” or film, the epistemophilia that so drives our engagement with both narrative and documentary cinema is repeatedly blocked in favor of a hermeneutically opaque, even disabling stress on the image’s surface texture, mutability and already shaky depth. This is the porous frame, and the more we look at it the harder it is to find a moment when it is not at work in Altman’s cinema.

Cinema in process – Charting idiosyncratic form, looking for style

If MASH (1970) offered an introduction to Altman’s style of filmmaking to most early ’70s viewers, such an encounter is today more likely to occur through a viewing of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville or perhaps a “post-comeback” film such as The Player (1992) or Short Cuts (1993). An ossified museum piece in its cavalier and problematic treatment of geopolitics, race, and gender, MASH nonetheless clearly sets out some of the most basic stylistic traits familiar from the director’s subsequent work – in particular, his specific use of actors, rather chaotic improvisatory mood, densely crowded “deep focus” dialogue track, extensive utilising of the zoom lens, flattened depth of field and overall “soft” image texture. The film also exhibits some nonchalant disregard for inherited formal conventions. Yet unlike the film modernism flowering in Europe and Japan during the 1960s, the film’s potentially reflexive developments – such as the 180-degree line being broken with a cut showing Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) first sitting down upon his arrival at the Army base, or the much-cited and highly presentational “Last Supper” scene showing the actors lined up on one side of a long table facing the camera – now barely shock, or perhaps even register, thanks in part to the irreverent comedic tone of MASH’s episodic story and the visual continuity provided by the omnipresent olive greens of its military tents and uniforms.

In what would become a consistent aesthetic paradox, the considerably soft or diffuse image quality that also became another Altman hallmark tends to smooth over the potential jolting effects of casually disrespectful treatments of formal conventions. The ways in which the image draws attention to itself also becomes its own potentially “distracting” or reflexive element. Robert Kolker (2011) describes what he sees as the inauguration of Altman’s contradictory stylistic signature here:

MASH is photographed (by Harold E. Stine) in Panavision, whose great width is often used to suggest large horizons or actions. But Altman wishes to constrict the space of MASH, and to this end he employs a telephoto lens for most of the sequences, which compresses space, making it flat…. Unlike shallow-focus cinematography, which foregrounds the figures in focus, creating an undefined background, and deep focus,

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which articulates the objects from foreground to back, telephoto cinematography tends to background everything, or at least to put foreground and background on the same plane. (365-6)

This apparent contradiction is crucial to how Altman pursues an aesthetic that while not entirely unique – Akira Kurosawa is a famous forebear, as Kolker (2011, 365) notes – escapes both shallow focus and deep focus traditions found in Hollywood and beyond. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the filmmaker employs his technical tools to achieve ends seemingly opposite to their familiar uses while drawing attention to them in the process. One well-known explanation for formal-aesthetic play without obvious narrative or thematic purpose, yet operating within what remains a loosely defined narrative film, is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s influential notion of “free indirect subjectivity,” a concept explored in his famous 1966 “Cinema of Poetry” address and subsequent essay (2005) featuring discussion of the extensive camera “distractions” in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964) as key examples. In her important book on Altman, Helene Keyssar (1991) argues that this idea

is particularly relevant to 3 Women… because it is a critical tool that calls attention to style, and style is not an unavoidable aesthetic issue in this film but is central to its subject. (218)

While offering a viable, if necessarily also limiting, justification for this particular film’s over-determined image density, Keyssar’s matching of form to content arguably works more effectively in the case of 3 Women than elsewhere in Altman’s cinema because of the apparent obsession Millie (Shelley Duvall), for much of the film its primary protagonist, has with the details of consumerist-defined “lifestyle”, driving a strikingly self-conscious performance and ineffective marshaling of identity. The attention to form and style, however, is just as important where the given textual model is more genre-oriented. In the case of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman not only offers a “modern” take on the Hollywood Western’s heritage as mythic chronicler of individuality, ideology, community and capitalism, but also on how such a world should be visualized. The film is today treated as a canonical “New Hollywood” work for the very reasons it was coolly received in 1971: dense and epistemologically disabling sound-image construction – especially during the first 20 minutes – as well as its revisionist genre elements. While observing some genre conventions and classical Hollywood form in terms of visual iconography, the film’s general lack of “point-of-view” shots quietly neuters what Lacanian film theorists in the 1970s famously called the psychological and ideological “suture“ between protagonist, film and viewer. We are seldom given direct visual access to the film’s characters. The audience is left very much facing, rather than entering, the alien and often unappetizing world on screen only ever seen by means of an especially “foregrounded”, very murky image. The film almost bizarrely emphasizes opacity through a dense mise en scène dominated by faded dirty browns and icy blues rendered via soft filmic texture that is given additional prominence by

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the use of fog filters and experimental “flashing” of the negative (briefly exposing it to light prior to processing). What was risky and unprecedented at the time has since become just one chapter in the long history of filmmakers thrusting the mark of their authorship into the frame of very familiar generic texts through the “excessive” emphasizing of style. Although the reputation of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is now considerable, it is in many ways a rather unusual work in Altman’s career. The film today comes across as “textbook” and very stylish genre revisionism. The beauty of its images and overall construction now look, by Altman’s usual standards, uncharacteristically closed, neat, “perfect.” It is also – as with the very different, and less well-known, 3 Women – a case where Altman’s stylistic emphasis can be accounted for in thematic and even political terms. While often praised for his revisionist takes on Hollywood genres, Altman generally receives less acclaim for his treatment and exploration of the intimate European-style art film. The films he made in this mode were commonly seen at the time as weak American imitations of the real thing. Jonathan Rosenbaum (1978), for example, belittled both of the films most clearly engaged with this kind of “blue-print,” Images and 3 Women, as comprised of “shopworn art-house symbols.” If 3 Women’s reputation has enjoyed something of a resurgence since its DVD release, Images remains obscure, in part, because it strays so far from what we are usually told is Altman’s characteristic style: typically defined by a large cast without clear protagonists, crosscutting between multiple mini-narratives, and featuring a cacophonous dialogue track and general air of improvisation. In Images a single character is presented during a period of great crisis by way of very carefully composed images that nonetheless employ many of the key formal elements of Altman’s cinema. This is his “chamber film” in terms of both its claustrophobic scenario and up-close enunciation of style. Despite all the time spent alongside Cathryn (Susannah York), thanks to images that seem to inhabit the unnerving perspective, repressed memories and dreams of this deeply “unreliable” protagonist and sometime narrator, we find that she remains inaccessible from the long, creepy first scene where she receives telephone calls seemingly from herself while alone in a modern “designer” apartment, to the vertiginous final sequence. This is partly due to the fact that, no less than in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, Altman is working with a pre-existing visual, and to some extent thematic, template. Here is a quite self-conscious engagement with a very particular filmic inheritance and mode of image making: an intimate art cinema indebted to Bergman mixed with the psychological horror film. Images’ filmic sources provide multiple “excuses” for the director’s already trademark zooms. But these are now used to more overtly confusing and would-be “psychological “effect. A notable example is the lunge by the camera starting from way behind Cathryn standing near her car on a high hilltop, then “moving” past her shoulder and staring down onto what looks like another version of the same character getting out of an identical car at

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her country house. After some quick cuts, a similar lunge-zoom is enacted but now in reverse, from the rough perspective of the “second” Cathryn down below looking up at the hilltop double. (The remainder of the film never makes clear “which” Cathryn ultimately enters the house and vertiginously dominates the film’s narrative.) Following this effective double-framing altering us to what lies ahead, the film’s majority scenes set inside the house, occasionally also displaying prominent use of deep focus photography, effectively extend, in a more overt and radical way, Altman’s ongoing interest in cinema’s fundamentally destructive capacity to void distinctions – here between illusion and reality. This is achieved by way of celluloid’s material yet infinitely seductive impact, played out in a real yet also rather fantastical lush Irish setting. In the properly virtual world of Altman’s porous frame – here exploring its more epistemologically violent potential with uncommonly striking and direct effect – the central consciousness we see and hear so much from remains both palpable and yet unverifiable. The character herself is quite possibly another phantom. If McCabe or later Marlowe (in The Long Goodbye) are ultimately – from the start, in fact – “nothing” beneath Altman’s idiosyncratic formalist rendering of generically encoded exteriors, from Images’ first troubling scene Cathryn is the inheritor of 1960s European cinema’s relentless excoriation of character and subject as forged by the filmmaker’s particular marshalling and foregrounding of celluloid’s textural plasticity. For all the film’s stylistic interest, Images remains at least partially tethered to its more celebrated European model the apogee of which is Bergman’s Persona (1966). Brewster McCloud (1970) embodies the less self-consciously anguished yet more bewildering and unclassifiable experimental side of Altman’s filmmaking. While in many ways MASH today looks more “typical,”, in its wild celebration of cinema’s potential and mish-mash of references and styles Brewster McCloud feels closer to the beating heart of his work. Perhaps Altman’s most complicated and overtly reflexive film, due to its collagist play with multiple genres, unbelievable and at times absurdist characterization, bizarre narrative construction and rather fragmentary form, this multifarious work is a ravenous expression of – and interference with – established filmmaking principles. Here we see most clearly the triumph of process over outcome. Questions of whether the film is “good” as a finished product seem more irrelevant than ever to the pleasures of experiencing cinema in the process of self-manufacture. Brewster McCloud also shows how some of the commonplaces of Altman’s style can blind us to the diversity of his work. Rather than the common stress on long shots and leisurely zooms, this film features a disorienting editing style as its overarching formal principle, possibly showing the influence of the work of Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard alongside the more usually cited Federico Fellini and Bergman. “Few shots in the first twenty-five scenes of the film are held for longer than fifteen seconds,” Gerard Plecki (1985) points out, and “most of these scenes are shorter than a minute.” Seeking to explain such a disorienting style, he continues: “Quick transitions through crosscutting reinforce the

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atmosphere of a world gone mad: telephones ring, sirens blast, and radios blurt meaningless phrases throughout the opening of the film” (30). But the slightly more relaxed tempo of the remaining sequences doesn’t bring much more cohesion. Brewster McCloud’s oft-derided Fellini-indebted finale in which the actors are introduced as rather grotesque circus performers, effectively “bookending” the film’s twice repeated opening credit sequence (complete with a sonically doctored version of MGM’s Leo the Lion logo), serves as an appropriate exclamation point for some of the most overtly self-conscious, deconstructionist images ever seen in what is still – at least technically – a medium-budget Hollywood production. Possibly more so than any other film he made, Altman’s special formalism and experimental attitude towards what constitutes a feature film are given joyous and inquisitive expression. Although the barely-seen Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Images failed in quick succession to come anywhere near the commercial or critical success of MASH, Plecki (1985, 61-72) and some others suggest that The Long Goodbye and its two follow-ups, Thieves Like Us and California Split (both 1974), represent a turning away from overt formal experimentation and aesthetic bravura in favor of a more respectful inhabitation of genre, popular forms and narrative convention. Yet the second of this trio is, perhaps, Altman’s quietest, most leisurely and almost humorously uneventful film. And the noise and action of California Split’s extensive homosocial “buddy-movie” routines only partially mask the fact that this is the director’s most plotless work. Although on the surface appearing the most genre-faithful of the three, as a very lazy Depression-era escaped convict crime drama, Thieves Like Us is largely comprised of an almost non-narrative aimlessness for the majority of its running time, filled with scenes marked by taciturn longueurs. Alongside McCabe & Mrs. Miller this is Altman’s most beautiful film, although far less self-consciously so and without such overtly foregrounded telephoto lens work (even featuring a few notable deep focus compositions), an even more subtly reluctant genre piece featuring a miserly lack of action. Rather than its potentially exciting central story, Thieves Like Us remains from the very start dominated by tactile compositions stressing the lush, varied greens of Mississippi’s rainy landscape and impoverished 1930s built environment.

The least visually seductive work of Altman’s relaxed 1973-4 trio, California Split is also the most subtly radical. Taking narrative slackness to new extremes and further loosening once again the adherence to genre, the film’s forward movement both relies on and essays the apparently boundless energy and repartee generated by the mercurial bond between two men (some of which remains charming but is elsewhere highly self-indulgent, sexist and overtly trans-phobic), their fraternal communion eventually shown to be terribly empty at its core. California Split also further expands Altman’s slow zoom aesthetic. The first one-on-one meeting between the two protagonists in a dark bar offers a master class in his cinema’s basic style at the heart of which lies distinct use of the zoom and widescreen (as well as then-

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innovative multi-tracked live dialogue recording). Here sublime landscape and expressive interior décor, so important to the aesthetic pull of Thieves Like Us and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, are out of the picture in favour of a prosaic mise en scène dominated by present-day urban and suburban space. In stark contrast to both 1974 films, The Long Goodbye contains amongst the most narrative action of any Altman project, yet at the same time offers one of his most sustained aesthetic regimes when it comes to the use of the zoom, to which I will return ahead.

Following the significant critical and respectable box office success of Nashville (although enjoying nowhere near the returns of MASH), Altman moved on to treat his most discussed film as itself a generic/formal archetype. The first example of this subsequent auto-referencing is found in A Wedding, a project for which Altman boasted that he doubled the number of characters from Nashville’s 24 to 48. In this film, the reception following a wedding between “old money” and “nouveau riche” families provides a more contained yet also noisier and more chaotic stage upon which to play out multiple narrative and fragmentary character goings-on familiar from Nashville’s more expansive, multi-spatial terrain (one location now largely replacing the microcosm-style diverse spaces of the titular city’s music culture). While the earlier film has very loose generic ties to the musical, A Wedding’s textual structure relies even more entirely on the now patented “Altmanesque” multi-episodic narrative devoid of obvious protagonists and featuring apparently improvisatory dialogue. As in many of the director’s ’70s films such as The Long Goodbye (although less so Nashville itself), the noisy, dialogue-packed action is nearly always presented in sunlight-filled and brightly-lit rooms as rendered by characteristically soft, filtered images and mise en scène dominated by pastel colors.

After skeptically querying the “Big Statement” purpose of A Wedding’s very prominent zooms that show the large church during the quite ridiculous and sparsely attended Catholic wedding ceremony and then the equally bombastic mansion where most of the action will take place, Jonathan Rosenbaum (1978) offers Altman what he calls

an escape clause from the weighty demands that some critics have been placing on him, and propose that style is the subject of and the justification for most of his work – for better and for worse, and in A Wedding most of all. How we come to terms with this is our problem as well as his.... If the streets of Altmanville are paved with style and peopled with charming visitors and residents, the urban planning behind the whole complex still has some of the communal formlessness and pathos of condominiums and shopping malls.

This decidedly ambivalent account forces A Wedding, and by extension Altman’s 1970s work in general (especially following Nashville), into a box from which it cannot hope to escape. Rosenbaum wants to like the films for the way they seek to move beyond stale Hollywood conventions but he ultimately seems disappointed, pigeonholing the director as both thematically pretentious and threadbare as a stylist. Especially as compared to the moreovertly radical formalist innovations of modern European cinema, Altman is found

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neither a serious modernist nor a satisfying narrative filmmaker. In the process, Rosenbaum pinpoints what I think is still an unresolved issue in the director’s work and possibly where the true secret of his cinema resides. Altman’s particular, over-determined style remains a problem for critics and viewers alike – no matter how favourable or otherwise the given film is deemed to be. The porous frame escapes the criteria of both European modernism and Hollywood. It is too simple, and ultimately inaccurate, to position Altman’s work as “in between” these very generalised poles – a type of filmmaking seen as pretentious by eyes and minds addicted to mainstream Hollywood, and insufficiently adventurous for those attuned to European cinema’s diverse innovations. Rather than an unhappy and ultimately bland “compromise”, Altman’s 1970s films mount a significant and insidious challenge in the form of an infinitely ambiguous foregrounding of filmic materiality.

Cinema “en passant” – Impressionist images, film-viewer relations

If Altman’s cinema is to be treated more seriously than offering a middle-of-the-road mish-mash of Hollywood and art cinema clichés, what language and concepts best describe his heavily foregrounded visual style? While any cinema of ongoing worth always “escapes” singular accounts, including those of its purported author (and indeed his or her most ardent defenders), Altman nevertheless offers some useful discussion around his films’ distinct qualities by exploring their non-narrative and non-thematic – in other words, distinctly filmic – mode of address in a committed, sustained way. On the DVD audio commentary for 3 Women, Altman (2004) describes the film as practicing a cinematic form of “impressionism”:

It’s like a watercolor, in a funny way. You start and you want to vaguely give the impression but you don’t want to do hard lines. You want the viewer to look at it and let them make the hard lines…. These films, to me they’re more like paintings than literature. And it’s more about a visual idea and getting impressions from a visual idea. (2004)

While this might suggest the fetishizing of surface beauty, the director goes on to rail against just this temptation:

I don't let them [cinematographers] do the Rembrandt lighting. If I change the angle, if an actor is the subject… and the light comes from a certain source, and if I start changing my camera around, which changes the relative angle of that resource… [and] the cameraman says, “You ruined my picture!” I say, “I’m not doing a picture, these are moving, this is en passant.”… And so I want the freedom of the movement of the camera more than I do the art of the great lighting. (Altman, 2004)

The general notion of an impressionistic cinema is thereby not limited to the aesthetic content of the frame. Stressing the relationship such images have with an audience, Altman

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(2004) says that in the cinema (as opposed to the theatre),

everybody sees exactly the same thing. So I try to do anything to get the audience to move something, and not couch potato it there. And not say, “It’ll be delivered to me.” But that they have to kind of look over this way; if I can just get them to bend their neck, then I can get them involved, I can get them into the film…. So it’s this relationship to the audience that is the most fascinating.

The porous frame extends significantly out from the image itself. Rather than the often celebrated “democratic” nature of Altman’s big ensemble films exemplified by Nashville, in which the viewer can arguably choose which narrative strands to most invest in, it is with the viewer-image relationship itself – prior to, concurrent with, and beyond the literary constructions of narrative, character and theme – that these films reach their most substantial, yet quietly subtle, spectatorial (and thereby potentially “political”) effects. In 3 Women, Altman gives his cinematographer, Chuck Rosher Jr., a more prominent role than usual. Rosher extends and exaggerates, in a more intimate way, visual tendencies found in many of Altman’s other ’70s films, notably the extensive and often multiplied use of reflective surfaces and a particular interest in objects and material barriers. Like Images, 3 Women is a “chamber film”, not only when it comes to the central drama – highlighting an increasingly vertiginous relationship between two, or three, women – but also in the fine detailing, or close essaying, of Altman’s familiar stylistic and aesthetic obsessions. Pulling 3 Women’s elaborate form and loose central theme of unstable identity together in a way that resonates with the notion of an impressionistic cinema, Cumbow (1978) concludes: “We see the characters and the film through deceptive light – the same way they often see one another.” One word does seem a little out of place here, however. “Deceptive” risks implying there is a truth beneath or beyond such light and its image-stenciling. Altman’s films, and 3 Women in particular, suggest otherwise. The porous frame’s presentation of a cinematic reality – taking in the social and spatial milieu onscreen, the film itself, and the spectatorial situation of a given viewer, while blurring such clear distinctions – is the only one we have.

The other side of the coin to 3 Women’s small-scale essaying, Altman’s 1979 film Quintet offers up the director’s most grandiose exercise in style, with enormous zooms revealing or homing in on remarkably “post-apocalyptic” mise en scène. The two films starring Paul Newman, Quintet and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), were Altman’s most expensive of the 1970s only in part because of their high profile casts. They are also the most ambitious and elaborate in terms of aesthetic design, and probably his two greatest commercial failures. Supposedly financed by Fox on the basis of its science fiction setting in the wake of the Star Wars craze, Quintet is actually much closer to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – remarkably released the same year – both in terms of relentless mise en scène and overall vision of human society. “Its pessimism is part of a later expression in Altman’s work,” Kolker (2011) writes, describing an “experiment in despair and the

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reduction of… spatial openness” taking hold in the late ‘70s (384). This use of Altman’s formalism to reveal, if anything, a lack of substance, belief and truth at the heart of his films’ social realities, was arguably there from the very beginning. But the process is increasingly impossible to overlook starting with his swift fall from grace right after the success of Nashville.

Like most Altman scholars, Keyssar (1991) is no great admirer of his 1976 project, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (to cite and emphasize its rarely used full title), but still writes truthfully enough of this pivotal, badly received film: “When we have no reliable grounds for differentiating between theater and the world of our daily lives, we can no longer know when and how to act” (28). Unlike its famous predecessor, Altman’s expensive and quite vicious work, released during the United States’ bicentennial celebrations, was his first monumental critical and audience failure, earning a contract-annulling rebuke from super-producer Dino De Laurentiis. Yet despite, or in some cases partially due to, an all-star cast lead by Newman – his first performance for Altman only helping to deepen the film’s reflexive old West/Hollywood mirroring via deep-seeded investments in what the onscreen characters refer to reverentially as “the Showbusiness” – this is both Altman’s most politically and aesthetically radical work. Here his style reaches a real apogee. More than any of his other films aside from Images and later 3 Women, reality and illusion are hopelessly confused. More accurately and disturbingly, the latter has entirely overridden or destroyed the former. If the potential politics of this process in Images or 3 Women often concerns sexuality and gender, here it pertains to the founding and ongoing mythos powering the United States as an unreconciled colonial-settler society seduced and blinded by its own self-serving histoire – the ultimate fusing of “story” and “history”.

“The characters illustrate the mightily confused state of reality and illusion,” writes Janey Place (1980) in an unusually sympathetic review of Buffalo Bill and the Indians (even if finally belittling it in comparison with specific examples of European cinema):

Bill (or Paul Newman) can’t really ride his white stallion, and President Cleveland must consult an aide before answering to the effect that he, like Bill, writes all his own material. Bill keeps looking at reflections of himself, which fragment his personality: mirrors and portraits which seem more real than he is. Finally he must ask, “Where’s my real jacket?” when he wants to chase the “real” Indians who have escaped.

A highly presentational mode of performance and mise en scène now dominates the entire film, with every shot featuring carefully layered “backdrops” and “costumes.” The culmination of all this occurs in the “dream” sequence near the end between Bill Cody (Newman) and his vision of Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) following the latter’s death (for the only time in the film he now wears full “traditional” headdress). This is followed by Bill’s triumphal yet pathetic and devastatingly empty final performance wherein he effortlessly “kills” the replacement Sitting Bull (now played by his much more physically imposing

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former translator) in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The film then zooms into an extreme close-up of an especially cold-eyed Bill, followed by a cut to an apparent long shot from an unprecedented angle entirely beyond the camp. But this image is actually a kind of close-up of the absurd spectacle-space now seen as miniature kitsch, and the start of a long zoom out that acts to provide a literal sense of distance and “reveal” the significant artifice of the show. This image invokes the quite risible pathos of a cloistered simulacra or narrative that has long barricaded modern “America” within a narcissistic whiteness beyond which lies the possibility of actual history. And we are reminded of the important present-day “Showbusiness” and its ongoing role in this process when over the zoom out, the end credits roll for another – albeit unusually critical – expensive Hollywood production. Compared to Altman’s other ’70s work, and no doubt partly a product of the film’s enormous influence, Nashville now comes across as less striking in its visual style, despite a then unusual “episodic” and relatively non-linear narrative form. Yet the film’s importance in Altman’s development cannot be diminished. Irrespective of how long a given shot actually lasts on screen, and following the enlarging of such a process in Thieves Like Us and California Split, we find an increased structural and perspectival emphasis in Altman’s cinema on what are often called “master shots.” Plecki (1985) writes of the importance of such shots – which always potentially become something else – that the actors can thereby achieve greater freedom, rather than “break down each scene into long, medium, and close-up shots” (76). This unobtrusive style has been so effectively integrated, especially into a generic “indie film” aesthetic peaking in the 1990s, that it is now hard to see it as anything too out of the ordinary. The same is true of Nashville’s technical advance over the “flashing” used in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye by way of a new method of processing that enabled greater flexibility when it came to post-production adjustments of lighting and color, along with the increasing perfection of the director’s use of 8-track “deep focus” sound. In themselves, these important technical developments matter little to many viewers and even admirers of Altman’s work, especially those who have seen countless subsequent films influenced by Nashville. While he utilized and savored such advances on a technical and artistic level, and in the case of multi-tracked sound recording was clearly an innovator (again California Split is the less famous but more important work in this regard), what remains most immediately striking are not such technical details per se – often subsequently subsumed into cinema history and its evolving stylistic parameters – but the extremely flexible, elusive yet strongly material nature of the images themselves. These images, which this chapter characterises as amounting to a “porous frame”, are in many ways both defined and enabled, nevertheless, by the very particular employment of twin and frequently interconnected technical processes I shall now take in turn: the zoom and widescreen.

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The ubiquitous zoom – Vertiginous proximity, movement, textures

More than anywhere else in his work, the porous frame is most clearly felt in Altman’s use of the zoom to destabilize what might have ordinarily seemed to be both a reliable set of coordinates when it comes to camera-subject proximity and also the compositional frame for a given shot, the image’s borders and definition now in a state of near-constant flux. If a tracking shot provides evidence of the camera’s traversal of space and thereby its inherently limited potential movement in a particular environment, writes John Belton (1980-81) in his key article “The Bionic Eye: Zoom Aesthetics,” a zoom

produces the illusion of movement optically through continuous changes in the focal length of the lens, rather than through the actual movement of the camera, creating an image which progressively alters the original space being photographed and which subverts the illusion of depth…. In effect, the zoom produces an ellipsis of space by both traversing and not traversing it. (21)

The usually (although not always) very “smooth” zooms featured in Altman’s films usually far from hide the fact of their elliptical, epistemologically undermining effect – counterintuitively so, considering the apparent offering of increased knowledge through the optical penetration of space – in part due to the sheer frequency of such shots. What was once a punctuation device has become the new norm. On the one hand the zoom potentially humanizes the gaze, implying an “idea” or “consciousness” of the world, while on the other it highlights the image’s inherently artificial nature, further emphasizing its materiality. Describing a slow zoom from Millie/Pinky’s apartment through a small aquarium and down to Willie and the ground-level swimming pool in 3 Women, C. Jerry Kutner (2011) writes: “Where a tracking shot defines space, emphasizing its three-dimensionality, a zoom collapses space, making it fluid, dreamlike, and subjective.” While this is potentially true of any shot utilizing a telephoto lens – whether an actual reframing “zoom” is enacted or not – it is uncommonly emphasized and felt in much of Altman’s cinema. This is partly due to such zooms’ apparently unmotivated nature when it comes to their justification as either character point-of-view shots or in terms of the narrative/thematic highlighting of necessary information. Especially upon noticing the ubiquity of such an image type, the viewer also quickly becomes unsure as to exactly how close the camera is to the primary subjects in a scene. What might traditionally be seen as an establishing shot can soon become a close-up without the emphasis of a cut, and vice versa. Demarcation of shots, both in terms of their affective impact and theoretical understanding, becomes sketchy, temporary and contingent. If zooms are often used as a dramatic device, to call attention to narratively significant objects, surfaces or, most commonly, human subjects at a film’s dramatic apogee, in Altman’s work such justified “punctuation” is frequently lacking. The psychologically

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penetrating power of the zoom is thereby also downplayed. Complicating this further is the director’s use of the telephoto lens for many shots irrespective of their initial designation as long shots, close-ups, etc., and whether the frame remains “still”. In the process, not only does a re-framing via the zoom draw attention to itself when it does occur, it also tends to foreground the image at any given moment as the amorphous-made-actual product of technical and conscious choice. But it does so without a clearly designated purpose. The zoom has always had this potentially radical effect. But its enlarging in Altman’s work tends to do two paradoxical things at the same time: such “excessive” zooms provide a clear authorial signature, while the very same manoeuvres undermine the usual mechanism whereby we seek to read a filmmaker’s possible “intent”. Fred Camper describes the indeterminate and inherently fluid nature of the zoom:

No image can acquire a fixed value or overpowerful meaning, because every image may soon be transformed into another related image via the smooth, continuous zoom…. Civilization undergoing vast changes is thus seen through a lens which itself is continually changing the image. (Cited in Belton 1980-81, 22)

The porous frame is borne of the inherent properties of the zoom. The exaggerated formal aspects resulting from Altman’s trademark application of the zoom are apposite to the supposedly “vast changes,” to borrow Camper’s phrase, affecting American social reality at this moment of enhanced chaos and ambiguity. But to jump too quickly to claims about the politically progressive themes of this cinema – as is quite common in Altman scholarship, usually defined in relation to the ensemble form exemplified by Nashville – risks treating the films’ distinctly cinematic elements as prescriptive and more closed than they actually seem in the act of viewing. Through his formal rendering of the social minutiae of American life in the 1970s, at specific moments and in particular places, Altman’s work paints a broad yet devastating picture of a decade in which serious internal questions were being at least partially asked of the world’s most powerful culture. But his special method of representing this reality ultimately lies beyond, or in fact prior to, explicit narrative, thematic or character exposition, the image itself undergoing a transformation and breakdown of its traditional functions in asserting a knowable, consistent world. This process partakes of an important history when it comes to the cinematic presentation of space, especially as framed within debates around realism and modernism that stress the breakdown of a Euclidean portrayal and understanding of the world. This is where Belton’s (1980-81) account of the zoom as an historical symptom can helps us understand Altman’s contribution to cinema’s progressive development:

Spatially distorting and inherently self-conscious, the zoom reflects the disintegration of cinematic codes developed before the Second World War…. Space is no longer defined in terms of perspective cues and parallax, but in terms of changing image size and time. (27)

Altman’s use of the zoom is historically embedded both technologically and socio-culturally.

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His films demonstrate in stark terms that this transformation of the image is not simply a case of “normal” cinematic vision being interrupted by the material blockage of technological trickery and manipulation. Drawing on Stan Brakhage’s book Metaphors on Vision, Belton (1980-81) writes:

[A]ll lenses are abnormal (i.e., non-objective). They bend, separate, then reassemble light. Even normal lenses are only relativistically objective: they are ground to reproduce images consistent with the way in which a specific culture perceives space. (22)

Rather than exceptions, Altman’s zooms remind us of the inherently artificial and non-human nature of the moving image per se. Touching on the more sociological or anthropological position explored by many Altman scholars, Kolker (2011) argues: “The zoom for Altman is a tool of narrative inquiry, an attempt to understand characters and mise-en-scène.” Instead of the tracking shot’s “positive sense of space transgressed,” the zoom

inscribes the parts and details of the visual and narrative field…. The point of view given the viewer is that of discoverer and connector. The zoom functions as an offering of perspective and detail, of coaxing, leading but never totally or comfortably situating he viewer, or closing off the space that is being examined. (371)

While this chimes well enough with Altman’s stress on film-viewer relations, can we say for sure where the narrative is, or when it is in operation within such dramatically “slack” or evasive films, even those that seem most connected to their generic archetypes? Certainly, Altman is a narrative filmmaker, but he appears at best only partially, reluctantly and sporadically interested in charting a narrative line. This is patently obvious when watching the films, and the director has repeatedly made it known in interviews that his interest is in cinema as “painting” or even “music” rather than storytelling. These images do exhibit a kind of “coaxing” or “leading.” However, at the exact same time they actually empty out what we might typically expect to be driving such a process: a more clearly defined purpose and authorial intent. But what is the outcome of Altman’s coaxing and leading? The result is an immense opening up of viewer freedom, thanks most centrally to the zoom – a technique often historically frowned upon by some critics and filmmakers as the ultimate in unsubtle evidence of a forceful director’s hand. It is perhaps counterintuitive, yet also entirely appropriate and instructive, that for many commentators Altman’s zoom-heavy style reaches its peak with arguably his most narratively dense and exciting film, The Long Goodbye. Here we can see how formalism and narrative action operate concurrently yet never really clash in a modernist, dialectical sense. “To allow the audience a comprehension of Marlowe’s dilemma,” Kolker (2011) writes, “Altman and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, uproot perceptual stability, preventing a secure, centered observation of the characters in their surroundings” (372). The slippery nature of Altman’s aesthetic language certainly allows us to suture form and

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content back to together in this way despite, or understood in light of, the film’s very self-conscious ‘post-classical’ context, enhancing further its already reflexive portrait of a 1940s film noir figure marooned in colourful and relentlessly sunny early-‘70s California. The film’s especially soft-textured images are such that the viewer experiences this anachronistic scenario as looking upon, or “through”, a gauze-like screen. Kolker (2011) describes the heavily foregrounded, seemingly ubiquitous zoom technique driving the film’s “excessive” formalism:

Almost every shot in The Long Goodbye is either a very slow, never completed zoom into or out from the characters observed or a slow, almost imperceptible arc around or track across them. (372)

This process reaches its much-discussed apotheosis in the outdoor conversation and drinking scene between Marlowe (Elliot Gould) and Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden, whose presence in the film directly invokes noir’s earlier peak period). After an already very elaborate series of roaming zoom shots, focus manipulations and double-image compositions through use of reflective glass, Kolker describes the culmination:

at the end of the sequence, the camera zooms in and past both to the ocean behind them…. Here and throughout the film the movement comments, insists that there is more to be known, catches us up in an instability and an incompleteness. (Kolker 2011, 372)

How do we reconcile all this heavily foregrounded formal activity, which seems to suggest that knowledge is “incomplete”, unattainable, or even irrelevant, with what appears one of Altman’s more narratively oriented and genre-aligned films? Writing of the director’s constantly moving frame and how this formal principle differs from camera movement in both classical Hollywood and its more baroque or modernist extensions in the work of such filmmakers as Max Ophüls and Orson Welles, Gary Mairs (2006) suggests that here lies a complete abandonment of the pretext of motivation. Like many Altman fans, he sees The Long Goodbye as the apex of this procedure, arguing that

the constantly roving camera rarely insists upon point of view or audience identification. We only occasionally see as a character sees; instead, Altman presents the material panoramically. The story is generally observed from outside the action, the zooming and tracking providing a fluidly shifting overall perspective, most often in neutral medium shots that allow us to pick and choose within a sort of master vantage point which actions we wish to follow. It’s hard to imagine an audience “relating to” or “identifying with” Marlowe, [Nashville’s] Haven Hamilton, or even Mrs. Miller, experiencing their stories with (or “as”) them. Altman forces an arm’s length perspective, with the camera offering an “objective,” ideal view of the unfolding events rather than isolating and emphasizing key moments.

Rather than psychological or “expressionist,” Altman’s cinema is concurrently objective and subjective, realist and reflexive. The camera offers what seems a properly “human,” socially and topographically embedded gaze while also foregrounding its own coldly technical

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capacities. This is why Belton (1980-81) calls the zoom a “bionic eye”:

No fixed focal length lens can possibly approximate human vision. The eye, through complex saccadic movements, continuously focuses and refocuses on objects at different distances. Normal lenses can’t do this; they have a fixed depth of field. The vari-focal nature of the zoom lens, however, gives it a resemblance, in terms of its operations, to the human eye, which other lenses cannot duplicate. It maintains focus over a variety of depths. But the zoom lens is not really normal. It is a bionic, not a human, eye. (23)

These qualities tend to further problematize the notion that Altman’s visual style can be explained along character or narrative lines as well as the idea that the overt zooms represent the heightened status of a human agent (protagonist, director or viewer). On the one hand, the felt subjectivity of the zooming camera’s gaze tends to render people as “object-like”, plastically rendered formations on screen, their dramas and central stories treated with a greater sense of distance and abstraction. On the other hand, the purported author is conspicuously “lacking” when it comes to offering other explanations (within or outside the film’s diegesis) for all this formalist activity. Altman emerges as a key protagonist in Belton’s (1980-81) historical account of the zoom, once again putting these narrative and authorial functions when commenting on McCabe & Mrs. Miller:

Altman uses the zoom to assert his own narrative voice, frequently relying on it for transitions. Altman’s zooms function like jazz improvisations superimposed on a fixed melody: whether motivated or not, they signal his presence as a narrator…. [T]he film’s zooms have a transitional function: zooms-in eliminate space and, with it, time, while zooms-out reestablish both. (25)

The notion of a jazz-like improvisatory feel makes a lot of sense in this context, yet Belton seems to leave open the possibility that such devices are “embellishments” of visual form, and that comparably “normal” space and time are still perceptible in between or beyond the manipulations of the zoom. Like the frequent appellation of temps mort or “dead time” to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Resnais and other European 1960s modernist filmmakers, in which temporality is perceived to periodically kill off narrative action, Belton’s characterization of the zoom in Altman is insufficiently central. The same might even be true of some of the filmmaker’s most ardent supporters. In my estimation, his work’s visual style, as powered so crucially by the zoom lens in its various capacities, is far more fundamental than any “accenting,” ornamentation or improvisatory embellishment. The ubiquitous nature of the zoom becomes even more important when we take into account its frequent employment in shots that don’t actually “move.” Many of Altman’s “still” images are comprised of a flattened depth of field created through the use of a telephoto lens, interspersed with variously moving shots and other still frames featuring shallow focus (and very occasionally deep focus), sometimes as dictated by the kind of space

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being essayed. For example, Cumbow (1978) writes of 3 Women’s different treatments of interior and exterior space:

The first thing I noticed about 3 Women was the way long lenses are used to make Chuck Rosher Jr.’s photography of the interiors rich, deep, textured, evocative… while the exteriors are deliberately given a depthless, flat, artificial look. The recurrent, monotonous California desertscape… [makes the characters] appear claustrophobically trapped, as if lost in the compressed two-dimensionality of a postcard picture.

Again, 3 Women provides both a stark and clear illustration of many of Altman’s visual devices, while also presenting them with an order and logic (in this case often via spatial delineation) that, where it may exist, is both specific to the given textual model/form and not necessarily a reliable “language” by which to read the film or Altman’s work in general. A different, more insidiously subtle yet bold regime of focal length variation can be seen in Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Place (1980) writes of the film’s aesthetic field in which Bill finds himself both a mythic “star” and an insubstantial, alienated shell, noting the different ways that Altman films his characters:

The price of all that glory and fakery is isolation at the least and schizophrenia at the worst. From the beginning Bill is alone in the frame, even when in a group…. Where most shots in the film have a long – if flattened – depth of field, Bill’s have nearly none, leaving the background out of focus behind him and isolating him from everything and everybody. By the last shot his legend and his very appearance are the fragmented subject of endless recontextualizing. He is lost…. The senseless eyes of Bill look uncomprehendingly on the show and out to its (and the film’s) audience. With the zoom out, the set of the movie is included.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians provides an especially acute example of how, rather than decorative or ‘sophisticated’ window dressing for narrative and thematic development, overt zooms and variously manipulated focal length can actually replace or constitute such content. This is despite the fact that the film has often been criticised for being uncharacteristically explicit in mounting a polemical attack on the founding and ongoing mythology of both the United States and Hollywood. Irrespective of the script’s declarative elements, there is no single shot in the whole film that does not utilize the unique visual language of its director to properly embody these central themes before or irrespective of their verbal enunciation. At the heart of this process is the perfection of Altman’s work with the telephoto lens, combined with careful use of color, and perspectival manipulation of backdrops, or flats – be they for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows within the film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians itself, the landscape beyond. Place (1980) summarises this rich aesthetic mix:

A long lens flattens the distances and spatial relations throughout the picture, falsifying the western panorama. The sepia tones give the picture a “period” look, contradicted by the other primary color motif – the bright red of the pillars of the stands, Bill’s bathrobe, Halsey’s blanket, and elsewhere. At one point Altman frames two flats, one for the Wild West Show and one a “real” backdrop for the film itself, side by side.

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Place (1980) is right to suggest this is one of the most strikingly radical films ever made by a Hollywood studio for its critique of a fraudulently mythic “America”. But alongside and prior to this, it may very well be equally so in terms of Altman’s work on the image. Such aesthetic “excess”, at the driving heart of which lies the zoom, remains less overtly modernist and radically felt than in the work of Antonioni or Godard to be sure, yet possibly more insidious and even ambiguous in its impact. Kolker (2011) speaks of Altman using the zoom with the effect of

drifting off, away from the main character… to suggest a subjective sense of vagueness and disorientation; elsewhere he will use it to capture the particulars of a defined area, reorganizing the space of a given sequence by developing it as a place of inquiry rather than accepting it as a preexistent whole. (364-5)

This inquiry, however, rarely tends to yield any kind of knowledge or confirmation of meaning, be it interior to or beyond the given textual universe. More immediately than both diegetic scenario and the “real” world outside such technical artifice, the zoom plunges us right into the true opacity of cinema’s own slippery, material, and here notably porous, truth.

Remaking widescreen space – Stretching, constricting, flattening

Altman’s celebrated and influential orchestration of the zoom often tends to overshadow his highly important and particular use of the wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio, often referred to during this period as Panavision (the trademark for a technology perfecting the earlier CinemaScope format). Of his 13 features released during the 1970s, all but three – Thieves Like Us, Quintet, and A Perfect Couple (1979), each shot using non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen – use 2.35:1, including the director’s most celebrated films from this period. As with the zoom, Altman’s trademark use of extreme widescreen is not only the result of technical innovation, but also marked by the quite excessive and, in many respects, counterintuitive ends to which it is put. Following the widespread introduction of different widescreen systems in the 1950s, definitions of “normal” lenses and thereby cinematic space itself were transformed. In particular, Belton (1980-81) writes: “The redefinition of space begun by Cinemascope was continued and modified by the zoom lens.” (24) Nowhere are the often strange and denaturalizing effects of this combination felt more in the commercial cinema than in Altman’s 1970s work. For some years following the introduction of CinemaScope in 1953, films using this format were hampered by the inability of anamorphic lenses to maintain proper focus at the edges of the very wide frame. While by the 1970s this was largely resolved, Altman’s taking up of latest-innovation technology once again utilizes its potential in a way that goes against the grain. Essentially undermining Panavision’s “improved” anamorphic presentation, his films resist the “professional” impetus stressing perceptual

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audiovisual conventions of image sharpness, clarity and transparency, and instead return it – now with increased control thanks in part to the zoom – to opacity. Not only was 2.35:1 clearly an aesthetic choice by Altman, and rarely if ever due to studio insistence, but the director often chose the format to shoot films whose subject matter and overall mood would more usually suggest the comparably intimate 1.85:1 frame (which by the ’70s had become the new “Academy” norm, with 1.37:1 virtually extinct for commercial Hollywood productions). In particular, the narrative form, performative mode and thematic material of films such as Brewster McCloud, Images, California Split, 3 Women, A Wedding and even Nashville would suggest the use of 1.85:1. I would equally argue that the approach to genre in many of the remaining films doesn’t necessarily sit easily with the epic or spectacular aesthetic typically invoked by 2.35:1 either. In a pioneering 1963 study advocating widescreen technologies and their aesthetic potential, Charles Barr describes critics’ traditional advocacy of the old 1.37:1 Academy ratio against the then-newer formats:

[W]e either see a thing or we don’t. If a detail is important, the director singles it out for us; if there is a symbol or a meaningful connection to be noted, the director again does it for us, emphasizing it by close-ups. (17)

“If I had to sum up its implications,” Barr (1963) writes in his defence of CinemaScope, “I would say that it gives a greater range for gradation of emphasis” (18). In one sense Altman follows this approach. But in the process of generating gradation through a kind of ubiquitous emphasis, especially in the combination of widescreen and telephoto lens work, the whole notion becomes lost. One of the most important effects of Altman’s use of widescreen in combination with frame “movement” via the zoom is that the very products of such technological advancement – in theory an extended range of vision both laterally and in terms of proximity, leading to a more whole or total account of space – is actually reversed, resulting in increased partiality and fragmentation. To show more, to cover more ground, can, it turns out, exponentially impede knowledge rather than further indulge the epistemophilic gaze. To see less overall space via the 1.37:1 frame’s “keyhole” (especially as enhanced by deep focus) or 1.85:1 can allow a greater sense of epistemological gain and power – as the critics of CinemaScope indeed sought to judgmentally argue. One example of Altman’s counterintuitive use of widescreen is his method of shooting the prominent murals in 3 Women. We see the murals refracted through water and various reflective surfaces via extended tracking shots, zooms and dissolves across them, but the viewer never really gets a clear, extended view of any single work. Despite the film’s use of 2.35:1 and its potentially picturesque desert locations, topographically informative establishing shots are also conspicuously absent. This tendency extends, in different and sometimes more reflexive ways, to the films that one might more reasonably expect to be shot in Panavision, such as the two “loose” Westerns, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill

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and the Indians. In both cases, Altman’s treatment of landscape is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, Carrie Rickey (1977) argues (with possible overstatement) that Altman seems “obsessed with landscape” (45). Yet if this is the case, it is in a decidedly cautious, some might say respectful and ultimately very distanced and again “painterly” way. Whatever the location, and despite the fact that he rarely focuses on a classically urban culture and milieu, Altman remains a cosmopolitan filmmaker with little real affinity for “nature”. In these films we never truly enter the landscape. Rickey (1977) suggests this is because the director

sees it as a frontier that should remain unexplored. He uses landscapes of incredible crispness in his movies – the Rockies in Buffalo Bill, the lower Sierra desert in Three Women, the Pacific Ocean in The Long Goodbye, the timberland of McCabe. But for Altman’s purposes, these remain as scenery in which to place his delimited waystations…. What’s important to Altman is the humanscape. His movies are jammed with noise and overpopulation. His characters always seem bereft of privacy, instead conducting private business in the public arena. No one has a room of his or her own... (45)

Both McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians are in this way given an added political dimension by taking in environmentalism as well as critiques of capitalism and imperialist domination of the land’s original inhabitants along with the violent appropriation of their resources. While I agree that Altman uses his sometimes rather exotic locations as backdrops more than legitimate features (or “characters” in their own right), nevertheless to emphasize the notion of a “humanscape” suggests a choice between humans and other onscreen objects. In the process, the films’ focus on their own materiality – using human and non-human bodies as raw material – is easily overlooked. If landscape as delivered through Altman’s widescreen frame is a kind of “painterly” backdrop to the action, with camera and people never fully entering its wilds, the image nonetheless often draws our attention to details of a given environment. Thanks to the zoom, this does not necessitate increased physical proximity per se. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, when the action leaves the small remote town in development it is only to visit a slightly larger one nearby. Sublime nature remains “out there,” even if very close by – indeed, rather threateningly so, with the characters’ every purpose channeled into building modern comforts as a buffer between nascent “civilization” and the wilderness. There is no apparent romantic, masculinist drive to return anew to the frontier (as in the “classical” Western). In the case of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, it is especially notable that we never see a clear image of Bill Cody or his management clique outside of the demarcated space of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Most notably, the one time they reluctantly venture beyond the safety of their camp (considering the trouble Bill has finding “my real jacket,” perhaps an unusual event) – to search for Sitting Bull and his companions after they “escape” – the posse’s departure and then unsuccessful, bedraggled return is only seen via very hazy telephoto lens shots from the safe perspective of home base. The wilderness, and by implication America’s real, bloody colonial-settler history, remains dangerously “out there.”

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This confining of the camera when it comes to accessing nature has more overtly reflexive implications as well. The only two images we see in Buffalo Bill and the Indians that must have been shot from outside of Bill’s privileged and pointedly virtual space are the gruesome close-up of Sitting Bull’s burnt remains – the location of and point-of-view for which remain entirely unexplained – and the film’s remarkable final shot from far beyond the show’s borders. Altman’s films utilize the widescreen frame to include the detritus of contemporary, historical and mythic America, with simulacral “reality” remaining the anthropologically proper focus. The most obvious examples are once again the two Westerns. Cumbow (1978) writes of the clapped-out version of US masculinity that is seen in 3 Women as being connected to Hollywood notions of the West, such that

the tavern called Dodge City, the apartments the Purple Sage, and the firing range and bike park, the Santa Fe Trail… evoke the same phony backlot-façade West that formed the milieu of Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

The difference, thematically at least, is that Buffalo Bill and the Indians imagines the absurd, shared origins of “the Showbusiness” and “America”, as well as the deeply connected risible and rancid heart of both, while 3 Women can be read as providing a more ironic contemporary take on the ongoing anachronism, artifice and damaging long-term effects of such myths. In the latter film, Altman utilizes the 2.35:1 frame to provide more contextual “stuff,” whether narratively or thematically recoupable to the purported focus of the scene or not. This theoretical increase in spatial rendering tends, however, to further muddy rather than clarify the film’s meanings, embedding it even deeper into the “rubbish” of history just as it emerges as an especially open and aesthetically engaging text. The omnipresence of the zoom, or the immanent possibility of its enactment, is the handmaiden of this process. Be it left/right or apparent forward/backward movement, the more lateral access our vision has to the spaces shown in the film through the widescreen frame, the less we feel we know about these spaces and understand what they mean. Beyond being extravagant box office and critical failures neatly bookending the far less celebrated second half of Altman’s 1970s work, featuring almost exactly matched pessimistic visions of the United States and perhaps even Western civilization – charting a particular colonial settler society’s mythic origins, and its logical future outcome resulting from environmental neglect and an ideology of relentless competition, respectively – Buffalo Bill and the Indians and Quintet also offer striking recastings of widescreen space. In 1976 Altman was perfecting his use of 2.35:1 and its seamless combination with zoom and focal length manipulation. Three years later, he was using a different widescreen ratio to forge a bold new experiment. As Kolker (2011) writes of Quintet:

Here Altman does not play off the horizontal expanse of the Panavision screen against the compressed space of the telephoto lens. The film is shot in non-anamorphic widescreen

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and the peripheral circumference of the camera lens is smeared, so that the gaze is moved inward toward the center, which is itself in frozen decay. If the possibility of vital expansion is just slightly suggested at the peripheries of McCabe, it is denied altogether by the absence of peripheries in Quintet. (384)

By presenting a more modest widescreen frame in an utterly unique way, this largely unloved film makes literal what I have been arguing is an important feature of Altman’s work. But it is now taken to uniquely reflexive ends. The director typically uses widescreen to make the details of the world “blurry” and indistinct, combining this with the extensive, diverse telephoto lens work as well as notable but still relatively subtle image filtering. With Quintet he does so through a combination of enormous zoom maneuvers, 1.85:1 widescreen, and a consistently radical filtering of the image. Whereas Altman’s trademark soft image texture is usually quite consistent across the frame, its hard black edges bringing a kind of neat border to an at times seemingly chaotic visual field, in this film there is an actual “smudging” as we move from a comparably clear image at the center of the frame (still none too sharp), across the sizably blurry and indistinct peripheries on either side caused by custom designed filters that give the impression Vaseline or ice has been placed on the lens. This technique effectively makes the visible field, at least its legible portion, akin to an old “Academy” shape and distorts the black edges of the frame. Although Altman’s 1970s production is technically rounded out by the much more aesthetically modest A Perfect Couple, Quintet stands as a remarkable edifice and summation. Here lies the real apogee and conclusion to this filmmaker’s decade-long “secret” work on the materiality of the moving image as the epicentre of a singular and increasingly challenging style, with the zoom and unique use of widescreen at its heart, largely carried out within the auspices of Hollywood narrative cinema.

Conclusion – Distance and plasticity

Visual style in the 1970s films of Robert Altman is powered by a very significant paradox. The zoom lens is surely the most overtly voyeuristic of all cinematic devices. And yet in the work of the filmmaker who arguably utilizes it more than any other – and despite the frequent presence in his films of female nudity (albeit, many have argued, quite starkly desexualized) – the ethically problematic and violently “penetrative” effects of this technique are largely undermined. We are also given enormous access to the spaces in which a scene is staged through the consistent and seemingly counterintuitive use of the 2.35:1 widescreen frame, such lateral expansion becoming partial, fragmentary and opaque. Despite such extensive front-to-back “movement” and left-to-right enlargement, the viewer’s epistemophilic and scopophilic desires are repeatedly blocked. Such blockage generates enormous space for other kinds of looking and engagement: with the human body on screen, the world it appears to inhabit, and the technical/aesthetic stuff of cinema itself “in action.”

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Altman’s cinema lives and breathes in process rather than outcome – both that of the film’s manufacture and its unique “reawakening” at the moment of spectatorship. Even more than the recurrent use of the zoom and widescreen, the real secret of Altman’s style is perhaps an always reconstituted and paradoxical distancing brought about through a materialist stress on image texture that is generated, bordered and characterized by a porous, forever unstable frame (even as such filmmaking techniques often appear to bring us closer to the people and reality on screen). We are less attuned to this kind of distancing and overt materialism in cinema from the United States. Yet these qualities are not only at the very heart of Altman’s style, and its importantly enabled effects. They also help explain why it is that his work remains so difficult to account for (no matter how “good” a given viewer or critic might deem the films to be) especially as this process is achieved through techniques commonly credited with allowing an almost violent access to the interior and social worlds of human experience. “Altman is like a history painter,” writes Rickey (1977), “carefully recording (the sounds as well as the images) of contemporary life without any particular bias, opinion, or analysis.” (47) The pulling-yet-distancing result of Altman’s over-determined visual style nevertheless brings about more than cool detachment or glib irony. These remain narrative feature films about characters, shot with the extensive use of what are widely considered stylistic markers of realism such as the zoom and a filmmaking technique and mode of performance drawing heavily on improvisation. Yet these elements stress the plasticity of the image and the palpable human world on screen in a truly unique and sustained fashion. Whether this plasticity – taken as the behaviorally unpredictable presentation of characters and bodies, or as the material, textural and spatial mutability resulting from the telephoto lens and its different zoom maneuvers – is germane to human beings themselves, or the result of their being rendered by Altman’s porous frame, remains an open question.

References - Altman, Robert (2004) 3 Women DVD Commentary Track, New York: Criterion Collection. - Barr, Charles (1963) ‘CinemaScope: Before and After’, Film Quarterly, 16.4, Summer: 4-24. - Belton, John (1980-81) ‘The Bionic Eye: Zoom Esthetics’, Cineaste, 11.1, Winter: 20-27. - Cumbow, Robert C. (1978) ‘It’s Time to Come Inside Now: An Appreciation of Robert Altman’s 3 Women’, Parallax View: Smart Words About Cinema (accessed February 20, 2014), online: http://parallax-view.org/2010/08/29/“it’s-time-to-come-inside-now”-an-appreciation-of-robert-altman’s-3-women/. (Originally published in Movietone News, 58-59, August 1978.) - Keyssar, Helene (1991) Robert Altman’s America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Kolker, Robert (2011) A Cinema of Loneliness (4th edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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- Kutner, C. Jerry (2011) ‘Notes on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977)’, Bright Lights Film Journal, May 26 2011 (accessed April 30, 2014), online: http://brightlightsfilm.com/notes-on-a-slow-zoom-robert-altmans-3-women-1977/#.U3Khia2Sz6k. - Mairs, Gary (2006) ’A Certain Detachment: The “New Altmans”’, The High Hat, no. 7, Fall 2006 (accessed March 10, 2014), online: http://thehighhat.com/Potlatch/007/altmans_mairs.html. - Pasolini, Pier Paolo (2005) ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, in Heretical Empiricism (trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett), Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. - Place, Janey (1980) ‘Buffalo Bill and the Indians: Welcome to Show Business’, Jump Cut, 23, October: 21-22 (accessed March 10, 2014), online: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC23folder/BuffBill-Indians.html. - Plecki, Gerard (1985) Robert Altman. Boston: Twayne Publishers. - Rickey, Carrie (1977) ‘Fassbinder and Altman: Approaches to Filmmaking’, Performing Arts Journal, 2.2, Autumn: 33-48. - Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1978) ‘An Altman’, Film Comment, September-October (accessed February 20, 2014), online: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2014/04/an-altman-on-a-wedding/ .