Recommended:
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977),
Tanner '88 [TV] (1988), Short Cuts (1993),
Cookie's Fortune (1998), Gosford Park (2001)
Worth a Look:
M*A*S*H (1970), Images
(1972), A Wedding (1978), Secret Honor (1984), Vincent & Theo (1990), A Prairie
Home Companion (2006)
"Robert
Altman is American cinema's greatest iconoclast. Prolific,
experimental, visionary and ambitious, he is a director whose
career spans over five decades and includes over thirty feature
films. Known as a maverick director (a label he denies), Altman
eschews the market-oriented climate of Hollywood, refusing to bow
to studio demands and insisting on total control over his
material. The result is an eclectic body of work that moves across
several genres, each picture effectively dismantling the generic
conventions on which it draws." - Tanya
Horeck (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)
"Altman's
use of multi-track sound is also incredibly complex: sounds are
layered upon one another, often emanating from different speakers
in such a way that the audience member must also decide what to
listen for. Indeed, watching and listening to an Altman film
inevitably requires an active participant: events unroll with a
Bazinian ambiguity. Altman's Korean War comedy M*A*S*H was
the director's first public success with this kind of soundtrack."
- Charles
Derry (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)
"Altman is
usually happier with large casts than small: while elegantly shot
and acted, the intimate theatrical adaptations he was reduced to
making in the 80s (he's always been an outsider in Hollywood) lack
the social, historical and philosophical import of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, the made-for-TV Tanner '88,
The Player and Short Cuts - movies which confirm
him, however erratic his output, as one of the greatest - and most
stylistically innovative - filmmakers of the modern era." - Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
"Maybe
there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses
humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down
to what people are to people." -
Robert Altman
Last
updated:
11/01/2008 01:31 AM.
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