On the Auteurship of Robert Altman

Assignment from 22 Feb 2011

For the purpose of this assignment I watched MASH, Gosford Park, and A Prairie Home Companion.


Altman's works are brilliant in that they provide a different kind of cinematic experience to the viewer, without being so "auteur" that it is obtuse and inaccessible to the average viewer. Granted, the movies require a fair bit of attention from the viewer to follow the beats of the story, though nothing is deliberately obscured.

And in that artful play between deliberated obscured information, and revealing every little detail to the viewer does Altman's auteurship lie. In all his movies he makes little circumstance of transition between story points, he simply moves from one to the next to the next. Instead of presenting a story as one might present Romeo and Juliet, in an entirely linear fashion with increasingly exciting pacing rising to the climax, Altman's films present events, things that happen. His pacing is even through each of his movies, with little pomp and circumstance is given to the climax, or traumatic events in the story, instead allowing the audience to react to that happening as they see fit. For example, when one of the singers from A Prairie Home Companion passes away in the middle of the show, Altman does not mark the occasion with tilted cameras or dramatic music. The characters react to it as they will, certainly, and from that the audience can form their opinions.

At times Altman obscures the audience's ability to pick out important information presented to them by overloading the audience with dialog and audio. Much of the dialog in his movies sounds as if it has been dubbed over, or louder than it should be based on the environment in which a scene occurs. To me it would seem as though this happens when he has no important information to reveal, and adds to the sense of the event happening than the story being told. Altman creates the sensation of being a fly on the wall, an ambivalent other who has been so privileged to observe an event unfolding before him. What I've said of Altman could be said of any filmmaker who has ever touched a Movieola. The difference is in that he pushes that experience to an extreme.

After first watching MASH and watching those events unfold before me lead me to gain an understanding of Altman's style. There his crash zooms and camera movements were somewhat rough, his lighting was fairly contrasty, his composition questionable in some instances. Then through Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion I saw the style established in MASH evolve to more sophisticated camerawork and lighting, though very quickly these films could be recognized as Altman's work from the feeling of overdubbing, even pacing, and omniscient point of view.