Altman (15.)
Directed by Ron Mann.
Featuring Robert Altman. 96 mins
Altman is a loving and enlightening portrait of a great film maker – and the great films are the least interesting thing in it. To be honest there isn't really time for them; he made 39 features film and in a film this length it means that even the landmark ones – The Player, McCabe and Mrs Miller – only get about four minutes of screen time. And that's fine; it's the man and the life that you really want to hear about. To be honest the scenes about his early life, fighting in World War Two and then casually working his way up through the TV industry until he became the director of a weekly helicopter cop show, Whirlybirds, were so enjoyable I was in no hurry to get to the movies.
The film is structured like a posthumous autobiography. Almost all you hear are Altman voices: either the man himself in archive recording, or family members. Though a number of big names appear – Julianne Moore, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis – they all get the shove after one line, the opportunity to define the term Altmanesque. So this isn't a balanced, analytical study of his work, (his widow is one of the film's producers) but neither is it a fevered superlative heaping contest. It makes its points in a quiet, undemonstrative way; much like one of his films.
His best films are almost miraculous but it did some right old rubbish as well. Altman's greatness seems to have been born out of his suffering from two degenerate vices – a love of gambling and actors. He didn't indulge in years of Kubrickian preparation he just went out there and took a punt on his and his cast's instincts to find a way through. As a result his career was marked by hot and cold streaks. The hottest of these was the early seventies one from MASH to Nashville, the coldest was the eighties when he was making low budget adaptations of stage plays or actually working in the theatre. It seems absurd that the most instinctively filmic of directors, one who did the most to make cinema a form distinct from the theatre should be at home on the boards. Here after all was a man whose trademark was overlapping dialogue and who revolutionised the way dialogue is recorded by developing a way for two or three conversations to be recoded simultaneously. (It's probably down to him that you can't hear half of the lines in major Hollywood movies – that and the accompanying explosions.)
Yet perhaps it isn't so paradoxical. The film relates his entry into the business. In the early fifties, thwarted in his attempts to be a Hollywood screenwriter, he decided to drive across the country to New York and become a playwright. Stopping off midway in his home town Kansas City he got sidetracked into a job making commercial films. Film, theatre, TV: it was all the same to him. The only things that motivated him were being with interesting people and an obsessive desire for realism. He was a theatre director who refused to bow to the proscenium arch.
What marks this film from other films about film directors is that this is a film about a life, rather than a career. I can't really imagine a film about a current Hollywood director, no matter how good the movies that would engage like this does. He was one of the last from a bygone Hollywood, one where artists learned their craft from living life rather than film or acting school.
Altman (15.)
Directed by Ron Mann.
Featuring Robert Altman. 96 mins
Altman is a loving and enlightening portrait of a great film maker – and the great films are the least interesting thing in it. To be honest there isn't really time for them; he made 39 features film and in a film this length it means that even the landmark ones – The Player, McCabe and Mrs Miller – only get about four minutes of screen time. And that's fine; it's the man and the life that you really want to hear about. To be honest the scenes about his early life, fighting in World War Two and then casually working his way up through the TV industry until he became the director of a weekly helicopter cop show, Whirlybirds, were so enjoyable I was in no hurry to get to the movies.
The film is structured like a posthumous autobiography. Almost all you hear are Altman voices: either the man himself in archive recording, or family members. Though a number of big names appear – Julianne Moore, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis – they all get the shove after one line, the opportunity to define the term Altmanesque. So this isn't a balanced, analytical study of his work, (his widow is one of the film's producers) but neither is it a fevered superlative heaping contest. It makes its points in a quiet, undemonstrative way; much like one of his films.
His best films are almost miraculous but it did some right old rubbish as well. Altman's greatness seems to have been born out of his suffering from two degenerate vices – a love of gambling and actors. He didn't indulge in years of Kubrickian preparation he just went out there and took a punt on his and his cast's instincts to find a way through. As a result his career was marked by hot and cold streaks. The hottest of these was the early seventies one from MASH to Nashville, the coldest was the eighties when he was making low budget adaptations of stage plays or actually working in the theatre. It seems absurd that the most instinctively filmic of directors, one who did the most to make cinema a form distinct from the theatre should be at home on the boards. Here after all was a man whose trademark was overlapping dialogue and who revolutionised the way dialogue is recorded by developing a way for two or three conversations to be recoded simultaneously. (It's probably down to him that you can't hear half of the lines in major Hollywood movies – that and the accompanying explosions.)
Yet perhaps it isn't so paradoxical. The film relates his entry into the business. In the early fifties, thwarted in his attempts to be a Hollywood screenwriter, he decided to drive across the country to New York and become a playwright. Stopping off midway in his home town Kansas City he got sidetracked into a job making commercial films. Film, theatre, TV: it was all the same to him. The only things that motivated him were being with interesting people and an obsessive desire for realism. He was a theatre director who refused to bow to the proscenium arch.
What marks this film from other films about film directors is that this is a film about a life, rather than a career. I can't really imagine a film about a current Hollywood director, no matter how good the movies that would engage like this does. He was one of the last from a bygone Hollywood, one where artists learned their craft from living life rather than film or acting school.
