Robert Altman: America's Rebel Director

I have a podcast called rehash I co-host it with my friend Hannah and it's all about internet phenomena that get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say we just concluded our fifth season which is all about what happens when art meets the internet is the sun rising on a new creative era or did it set before it even began go check it out [Music] Last month I attended a screening of Robert alman's irreverent classic Nashville a Loosely tethered story about 24 people operating

within the country music scene in Tennessee's capital city the film has a very unconventional narrative structure following these characters as they flit in and out of each other's lives in the run up to a Gala concert in honor of a fictional third party presidential candidate named Halal Philip Walker the final sequence Of the film takes place at the iconic paron Monument where the gala is being held and culminates in the assassination of the beautiful and frail country star Barbara Jean played by Ronnie Blakeley who has spent most of the movie in a hospital bed after

suffering a nervous breakdown the Assassin and unassuming side character named Kenny is quickly tackled by police as the rest of the characters including Barbara Jean's backup sulen stand Frozen in disbelief Until another unassuming side character and one of the film's many aspiring Stars Albuquerque picks up the mic and begins to sing a song called it don't worry me to the now rapturous audience before the camera zooms away from the action and pans up towards a Steely Blue Sky a week after I went to the screening this happened take a look at what happened since that

I haven't stopped thinking about how Alman not only prophesized where America Was headed but also how much of his filmography has managed to embody the essence of America regardless of what a PO hippie the guy may have been Robert Alman is more easily defined by his status as a filmmaker than by his filmography itself like critics usually land on Maverick or insiders Outsider when attempting to describe him referencing his tur relationship to Hollywood rather than the themes of his work you can tell an almond film from Its style he had a penchant for restless camera

movements constant zooms and tracking shots he filmed action through doors and windows he favored Meandering plot structures and lots and lots of mumbling and he used musical cues from countercultural musicians and composers like Leonard Cohen Stu yamashta Gerald Busby and Tom Pearson his style was so distinct in fact that its influence is impossible to ignore among a whole number of your favorite directors But because he covered an impossibly wide bread of genres Western Noir psychological Thriller chiz morality tale murder mystery there's no real way to sum up alman's contribution to cinema in a few words

one thing that has been agreed upon however is that he was undeniably interested in the character of his homeland America Robert alman's career soared in the 1970s and then underwent a lot of turbulence in the decades to follow until his death in 2006 consistently however his films painted a troubling yet empathetic absurd and paradoxical portrait of the United States and in the years since Nashville and even alman's death American culture has only become more absurd more paradoxical than ever before at this present moment where the Bedrock of America's founding values seemed to be crumbling by

the day violence bursting from the cracks the question of his country's character feels more Preent than ever so what exactly did alman's films have to say about America and how does he embody the spirit of a country he so loved but refused to venerate this is Robert Olman America's Rebel director Robert Alman was born in Kansas City in 1925 to an upper class Catholic Family but the Great Depression hit when he was a kid and the alans soon fell into a sedentary middleclass life as a teenager Alman attended military School before joining the Army as

a pilot and his first experience with Hollywood was in his late teens when he and his family moved to LA to begin phase training for World War II they stayed with his aunt a wealthy singer with a mansion in Beverly Hills and this is where Alman was first seduced by the Hollywood lifestyle but first he had a war to fight in the war he was a pilot with his own Bomber Crew yes their job was to fly over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies in the Pacific Theater and bomb them and here is where we

begin to see the contradictory aspects of alman's character when asked about his 46 missions in this region he said that it never occurred to him that he was killing people before admitting I don't think it would have bothered me later his screenwriter Brian McCay recalls that the one thing Alman did regret from his time at war was that if the mission was aboard in mid-flight his crew would Drop the left over bombs on farmhouses on their way back to the base McKay who it's important to note had a fr relationship with ultman said that was

something he was really sorry about but that could have been [ __ ] too because he is a spellbinder the rarest of storytellers alman's apparent feelings or lack thereof towards the brutality he played an active role in although I'm resistant to calling it indifference because this detachedness Could very well be a trauma response stands in marked contrast to the film that would later put him on the map and to his staunch opposition towards the Vietnam War and the war in Eck half a century later later after the war Alman married his first wife and returned

to California where he pursued various entry points into show business but aside from co-writing a script for the 1948 film bodyguard he found little success breaking into Hollywood which Was in a state of post-war disarray so the Alman family returned to Kansas City and Robert got a job creating instructional films for the Calvin company where he cultivated an interest in directing and womanizing here in the midst of a failing first marriage and waning relationship with his young daughter to whom he was a bit of an absentee father he made his first two features there was

the delinquents in 1957 which Is a soapy drama about rebellious teens that jumped onto the wave of Rebel Without a Cause but lacked any of its charm and really the edge of alman's later work and then there was a documentary called the James Dean story that same year the delinquents was purchased by the studio United Artists and provided Alman enough money to move back to California but since neither film LED to any further opportunities he turned to television for the next decade In tandem with his contemporaries Sam pekena Arthur Penn and Sydney lumit vets of

the new Hollywood movement who also got their start on the Silver Screen during his time as a television director an era which failed to produce anything he personally wished to boast about ultman already started to display the rebelliousness that would come to Define his career in film getting fired time and time again for his unorthodox approach to sound plot and Direction Writing in the intro to a companion book about Robert Alman Adrien danks argues that while Alman generally dismissed his background in television this experience in the hyper industrialized explicitly commercial and streamlined world of television

and corporate filmm provided a central impetus to and influence upon his approach to genre narrative and Technical and technological innovation throughout his career and his Reliance on formulas that allow for variation Innovation and increasingly willful digression Alman continued to butt heads with the industry and his next film a conv Ed psychological Thriller called cold day in the park which would later go on to influence his more introspective Bergman esque films like images and three women was a critical and Commercial flop it was not until Albin was middle-aged with a string of commercial failures and Broken

Bridges under his belt that he would finally Find success in the late 60s he belongs to a growing class of Americans who dissented the war in Vietnam and it was in this climate that he would make mash a 1970 War ROM starring an ensemble cast that incles to Donald southernland and alman's future longtime collaborator and my personal celebrity crush Elliot gold thanks to alman's Unorthodox filming methods which I'll elaborate on in this video Mash is unlike any other film of its time based on a book by Richard Hooker about the author's experience as a medical

surgeon in the mobile Army surgical hospital or Mash during the Korean War Mash is an episodic account of a medical team working near the front lines of the war led by three surgeons Hawkeye Duke and Trapper the surgeons are drafted into the war and thus operate as vessels for the anti-war sentiments of the people back home with much of the film focusing on their rebellious Antics Alman enraged people On set with his filming methods but he really cemented that idea of trust the process because Mash went on to be a massive hit Roger Eber pointed

out that Alman was integral to the success of the film I had an opportunity to read the original script and I found it uninteresting it would have been a failure if it had been directed like most comedies but ring Larder Jor wrote it I suspect for exactly the approach Robert Alman used in his Direction and So the angle of a glance or the timing of a pause is funnier than any number of conventional gag Lines John Mahoney for The Hollywood Reporter called it the finest American Comedy since Some Like It Hot the Mr Roberts of

the Korean War The Graduate of 1970 and also the film that had been expected from Robert Alman for some short time Mash went on to be the third highest grossing film that year making $81 million against its $3 million budget won the Grand Prix at Cons and received five Oscar nominations it also spawned an 11 season TV show which Alman hated but needless to say Mash more than put him on the map from this he was able to start his own Production Studio Lion's gate through which he could have the freedom to fund many of

his own films Mash also establishes the style that aln would become known for on top of the heavy zoom and mumbly dialogue dens outlines two major elements of alman's film Making that were very much on display in Ash One a panoramic form meaning a large Ensemble aesthetic where you get multiple interwoven plot lines and a digressive narrative structure and two a revisionist approach to classical Hollywood genres while Mash does show early signs of alman's spotty record when it comes to representing women many of the women in this movie are treated as objects or accessories to

the male characters and are often sexually Humiliated it also presents its own alternative to The Brute masculinity so often displayed War films at the time it opens with a song called suicide is painless written by alman's son Michael which evokes the tongue and cheek satirical tone that will play throughout the rest of the film and this iconic clastic approach towards classical tropes would become a staple of alman's filmography to come for Better or For Worse as Mash made clear Altman was Extremely averse to being told what to do the mark of many a male aour

after being discharged from the military and moving back home he describes himself as an ass wanting to be liked so much that I would agree with whoever I was talking to really dishonest about myself very anti- Authority his time in television or his frequent falling outs with screenwriters should tell us all we need to know about how almond felt about working under people he did not like to Be constrained and this is evident in the way he approached genre too take mccave and Mrs Miller for instance a 1971 film stirring war and Bey as a

mysterious man who shows up in a developing Washington town called Presbyterian Church named for its only standing structure hoping to settle here mcabe establishes a brothel with the help of an English Madam named Mrs Miller played by Julie Christie believing correctly that the sex trade Is what will help this town to flourish mcav and Mrs Miller has all the components of a western it takes place in the frontier land of the Pacific Northwest it's got a town that's more or less Lawless people are killed here without so much as a blink it's got tribalism among

purveyors of Industry mcab drunkenly highballs a crooked businessman looking to by the brothel and finds himself amidst a life or death battle over the very thing that gives he And Mrs Miller security and purpose these are all the components of a traditional Western only whenever the film is about to reach a generic Benchmark Alman renders it impotent the town is by definition a western town but it looks nothing like the Arid Sun soaked nostalgia towns of The Westerns were used to it's cold and drab and damp likely closer to what life was actually like for

settlers on the Northern Frontier combating their harsh Environments as opposed to the ominous sometimes epic music of a typical Western Alman chose to soundtrack his film with songs from Leonard Cohen's first album we're introduced to mcab with a stranger song repeating the phrase he was just some Joseph looking for a Manger as mcab climbs towards the town on his horse a Biblical illusion to a man in search of something to murder in one of MC's most vulnerable moments we hear an instrumental version of Suzanne that casts a gentle light on the previously Gruff elusive character

the songs imbue the film with a haunted feeling too folky and introspective for such a traditionally masculine genre and then in any Great Western we usually have a climactic showdown between the good guy and the bad guys some sort of duel MAV and Mrs Miller does end with a showdown but it's more like the scene in mash than it is like John Wayne whipping his from his holster and pointing it at Us The Showdown plays like a drawn out cat and mouse game with macab cowardly skirting around the town as his pursuers prow about killing

them off one by one by ambushing them or impishly tricking them there's no machismo here scholar Paul Arthur argues that there is no Noble motive behind mcab returning to the town and standing down the gunman but that he's only compelled to do so because that's what the protagonist of a western must do mcab doesn't exactly die For Glory didn't die to protect anyone could have attempted to flee to another town in the night but this is his generic oath it's a subtle commentary on an outdated Hollywood genre that recasts American history in a noble light

Maven Mrs Miller is subtle however because ultman still made a western that can be enjoyed as such as Arthur concludes it isn't that the familiar lineup of characters situations settings and themes is suppressed or distorted it is Simply present ented from unfamiliar angles stripped of its romanticized dualistic luster some critics hated what Alman had done with the Western Vincent Canby found the movie to be self-serious and its use of symbolism to be metalsome Rex's read for the Daily News was much harsher he said that mcav and Mrs Miller was one of the worst movies ever

made that people he watched it with in the theater were booing and hissing and ended his review with the Bold statement Alman is a master of obscenity and vulgarity whose sole purpose as a director seemed seems to be to shock humiliate and assault his audience in MAV and Mrs Miller he has thrown a pale of rotten swill at everyone in the theater and they're throwing it right back at him but these guys were in the minority the film was generally lauded for its atmospheric approach focusing Less on the story and more on its structure this

is now seen as a Hallmark Of alman's work that the form of his work the technical elements and the genre in which they're encased are just as if not more important than their contents the long goodbye another one of alman's films from that decade was met with a similar mix of outrage and awe the long goodbye is a 1973 nor film based on the Raymond Chancellor book of the same name and it follows the iconic hardboiled Philip Marlo character played by ellot gold who confronted with a Mysterious murder involving his best friend but this time

around Marlo is let's say softboiled typically no protagonists are shrewd cynical aspirational and really competent men who take control of the action around them however little they understand it Gold's Marlo is characteristically mumbling lanky unkempt and less so controlling of the action than it just kind of like happens to him Alman brings in comedic elements that you'd never Usually find in anir he repeats the theme song The Long goodbye over and over and over again throughout the film it's actually the only extra diagetic song played and every single time it appears in a different musical

genre he also includes a scene where all of our villains take their clothes off from no real reason the film also features explicit violence with Marlo doing little to stop it and even at the end perpetrating it Alman is again taking a Well-worn outdated American genre and asking us to question it he calls this Marlo rip vanwinkle a man who sleeps for 20 years and wakes up at the start of the film in an America he doesn't recognize one that is violent and scary and morally unclear not unlike a classic Noir except this is a

country he's completely alien to rather than weary of again some critics and even audiences did not take well to what Alman had done to the Noir and the long goodbye Performed poorly yet it and Maven Mrs Miller were both redeemed in the decades to follow and preserved by the national film registry as culturally historically or aesthetically significant alman's refusal to bend to the conventions of beloved industry forms genres that contribute to the country's mythmaking did not exactly win him favor during his time but his anti-oral approach to genre tapped into into something that only the

future could [Music] appreciate as has been well established Altman did what Altman wanted to do raised by a gambling father he was a hedonist in the truest sense driven by impulse when it came to drinking when it came to women and when it came to movie making which made him in many ways a difficult person to collaborate with since ultman was much more interested in on the spot decision-making he didn't see much value in the art of Screenwriting which is one that requires a great deal of planning this of course led to a lot of

conflict with his screenwriters he once told Brian McCay remember this I take all the credit and most of the money when you work with me in this way he was not unlike many male all tours kubric Hitchcock but in many ways he was as one interviewer observed about Alman he admires inar Bergman who has avoided the traps by totally isolating himself for Alman who surrounds himself from the moment he gets up to the moment he's poured into bed bergman's way is admirable but impossible ultman was a people person and while he was resistant to sharing

a leadership position he wasn't necessarily a control freak in the way we might expect from an aour filming an ultman movie was experiential because being on set was where most of alman's creative process would take place even as early as the delinquents He had made the set a microcosm of the movie itself grabbing real footage of his actors at a house party and putting it in the film and this gives his films an air of authenticity of course sometimes this doesn't quite work for example there's Popeye I watched Popeye religiously as a child and it

wasn't until re-watching it as an adult that I realized this movie is a fever dream the movie is pretty bizarre which we get into and it's also pretty jarring and Once you hear about how disastrous the production was you understand why Alman built an entire Village in Malta that his cast and crew could also live in which cost an exorbitant amount of money and because they ran into so many problems during filming like having to re-record most of Robin Williams dialogue and ADR having the actors sing the Music Live on set lay Miz style and

Myriad issues with the Practical effects all of this drove the production way Over budget and the Studio told Alman he had to wrap everything up regardless of if he was finished this is why the final scene where popey haphazardly saves olive oil into their adopted baby sweep PE from a giant octopus seems to take up the entire third act however costly and bizarre alman's methods were though popy has this kooky idiosyncratic charm that I think will only become more apparent as the film ages when we consider the state of CGI Laden children's movies now We

can appreciate how audacious alman's Vision really was I've always preferred filmmakers to be bold and fail than to play it safe and sometimes his Methods made for an actually joyful onset experience and a more realized final product for mcav and Mrs Miller for example he also built an entire town on location in BC this time plying the cast with vodka and living all together as if they were really on the frontier as the town developed throughout the film so it Did in real life until by the end it had cabins a brothel a bath house

a barber shop two saloons and a sawmill they also filmed it qu qually which is rare for a movie shoot and it was a lucky choice because the shoot ended with a major snowstorm instead of halting it due to bad weather ultman decided to push through and film The Last scenes in the snow which adds a really desolate and hopeless effect to the ending that you just couldn't recreate Bob I think took A perverse pleasure in putting me into that role knowing how uncomfortable it would make me to play that kind of a guy he

knew exactly what he was doing and what you see in the film the end result is this actor who doesn't like the character he's playing will what the audience get a guy who doesn't like himself so smart for Nashville he encouraged his cast of 24 leads to write their own dialogue play around with characterization and draw from their own Lives as much as possible he also cast actors who were unscripted and had them on set for much of the shoot so that everyone could get a feel of community like they were really in the world

of the film he's an actress director 99% of all actors love Robert Alman he he talks to you and you feel like you're really creating your own role improvisation is a tough skill to hone and something that doesn't come easily to every actor so Alman frequently worked with the same Rotating cast of actors like a company of sorts who were able to consistently deliver for him actors like gold Lily Tomlin David Arin Renee Ober xenoa Keith kerine Sally Kellerman and most notably the late beautiful princess of lank shelle Deval of course Alman was still preferential

to being at the top and so while many of his actors were instrumental in writing large chunks of their own dialogue like he did with the screen writers almond would take all the Credit Izzy from beind rewind has released a video this month about Shelley Deval and her storied complicated experience as Robert alman's Muse it's a companion video to this one which goes much more in depth with the Altman films that Shelley Deval starred in think of it as required viewing credit or not Alman was generally well-liked among his actors cultivating a rich environment where

creativity could really flourish as Alman himself Put it I never have really watched anybody else direct a film so I can just surmise what they do I have no idea I find more and more that the less I do the better the work comes out so now my function is really to try and stay out of the way and make the conditions and circumstances as conducive as I can for the actors to do what they do I actually like to think of him as the anti cubric collaborative improvisational filming as few takes as possible and

entirely Unconcerned with perfection I have it's an interesting I have an interesting relationship with this movie all right uh because uh I think the first reel of the movie is the worst mixed reel in the history of of Hollywood C okay it's so badly it it there's a level of incompetence to the mix that Hollywood never really goes below he's a pothead who doesn't know any better he thinks it sounds good yeah uhuh a lot of people think that Warren batty actually was kind of the co-director on that movie uh uh I asked Warren batty

about that once and he goes well you don't think that pothead could have got a Jilly Christie do you despite what Tarantino says about the quality of the first 20 minutes of mcabee's sound mixing I think the film's roughness contributes greatly to its realism this leaving things up to chance often makes for some really beautiful film making Films like Nashville Mash three women and his later Ensemble piece shortcuts all have this very lived in organic spontaneous feel to them like anything could just occur at any given moment and you wouldn't know if this was by

Design or if it just happens to have dropped onto set from the sky and left in the Final Cut alman's interviewer says it better than I could making his films more real is close to the core of alman's work as a director he wants to Catch the accidents of life and fling them on the screen hard enough to knock the breath out of the audience he wants to weigh the screen down with vulgarity pleasure pain ugliness and unexpected Beauty he wants magically to change two Dimensions into three and that's certainly true to sit down for

the one two 3 hours it takes to watch one of his films can be a very transportive experience it's very easy to look at Nashville and read it as your kind of State of the nation address at that time isn't it was that that must have been part of your intention something occurs to me and I think oh that's good and and then the the things that relate to it where it relates politically or culturally or to uh the audience that I'm eventually going to show it to I'm I heighten that up because I'm aware

of that but I don't u i don't carry any big causes on banners through these films alman's Films have been described as satirical and you can definitely see that in the way he bends genre but this doesn't come across as clearly in the themes of his films it's hard to find even his most satirical films particularly scathing of their subject matter especially when you compare them to the controversial nistic filmography of his contemporary Sam pekena one critic noted that next to the Wild Bunch mccave and Mrs Miller seemed soft and warm this goes for the

player As well one of his more overly satirical films this 1992 Thriller Stars Tim Rob as a SMY Studio executive named Griffin Mill who murders a failed screenwriter he suspects of sending him threatening postcards The Graduate part two from the jump it opens with Griffin sitting in his office and hearing pitch after pitch of the most insipid movie ideas you've ever heard all of which seem to be directly lifted from another film and starring either Julia Roberts or Bruce Willis or both the player has an open disdain for writers Blackness a mangy dog barks garbage

can Lids are lifted as derel in the streets haunt for food portraying them as aggressive pretentious [ __ ] and oversized Tweed Blazers it also has a deep estain for the rattin of Hollywood execs I'll be there right after my AA meeting oh Larry I didn't realize you uh had a drinking problem I don't really but that's where all the deals are being made these days It provides racial commentary making a very timely reference to the beating of Rodney King this is Pasadena we do not arrest the wrong person that's LA CA they kick your

ass and then they arrest you and it provides another extremely relevant commentary about the industry's habit of prioritizing commercial interests over art and America's pension for false optimism inserting tacked on Happy Endings and bigname stars on every film no matter of the material Throughout the film Griffin is pursued by another screenwriter hoping to pitch a script that ends with a woman being put to death the anti- Hollywood ending but instead we end the player with the shooting of this fully realized film and Julia Roberts plays the woman being taken into the execution chamber only to

be saved at the very last minute by Bruce Willis her final line being so long traffic was a and then with a wink and a nod the player itself concludes With Griffin having gotten away with murder and returning home to June the now pregnant girlfriend of his victim saying what took you so long traffic was a from the most perfunctory glance at this movie you can tell it's not a serious Thriller we can see the wink but in spite of that and in spite of alman's decades long conflict with Hollywood Studios Griffin is a sympathetic

character he's a smarmy womanizer and literal murderer but you feel bad for Him as he's thrust from situation to situation being relentlessly pursued from all directions never given a moment of rest you feel his exhaustion in the Final Act June asks him about his job and he's given the opportunity for nuance collectively we hear about 50,000 stories a year so it's hard I guess sometimes times I'm not nice and make enemies so even in his most searing Satire Alman takes a strangely empathetic approach to his most reviled enemy refuses to be too scathing the player

should have been controversial in Hollywood but everyone loved it even Alman in a VHS commentary of the film said it was a mild satire that offended no one I think that people say this is a satire and it's an attack on Hollywood it isn't it's I'm using Hollywood and the film business as a metaphor for culture and the country saying what a Metaphor for talking about greed and who we admire we admire we teach our children to admire people who make money and it doesn't make any difference how they make it you're also saying I'm

a part of this system aren't you AB you're saying this is me as well AB absolutely there's not one I can't do a satire about anything unless I'm at the core of it cuz otherwise I would I'm his propaganda ultimately I don't think ultman ever really hated Hollywood he Describes his early years in California as an era of staring being seduced by The Glitz and Glamour and the girls of it all and when you think about it the player is a critique of an industry that through this film Alman was happy to be welcomed back

into after a decade long Hiatus his films are almost too empathetic to be true satire it's been an ongoing back andth among Scholars of Altman as to whether or not his films are condescending about America but I Don't think so what struck me about Nashville in particular perhaps the most controversial of the bunch is that the film makes American culture look absolutely unhinged but it never opts to look down on it rather staring at it headon many nashvillians were offended by the film's depiction of their city but scholar Helen ker defends it the problem is

not that Alman reduces individuals or the American to predictable image and behaviors but Rather that we as audience are so ready to assume our knowledge of these people that we resist discrepancy and interpret eccentricity as condescension the characters are idiosyncratic and bizarre but never descend into unflattering hillbilly stereotypes rather offer to us frankly panoramically and pretty tamely in the scope of satires of the American South Alman told another interviewer with everything I do there's a question is this the way it really is do the bad Guys have to be real bad do the good guys

have to be real good I don't believe so I don't think it's all cut that easily it's of no interest to me to be a teacher or a moralist or a propagandist and I think the way he achieves this is through some very intentional techniques ones that have set him out from the rest well in an article wasn't it you said about nobody can ever has ever really made a good movie no I what I said was that I feel That the the medium of film has not yet really been explored in other words I

think that when we started uh a film we took it from theater literature and we were an extension of of another art form and uh it's still that way it's getting away from it and I think that eventually somebody will make a film that is purely a film and the audience can respond to as such something that can be really frustrating about Al man's films or really incredible if you're willing to Buy in is his use of overlapping dialogue what in any scene with more than one character sometimes tens or even hundreds he opts to

prioritize multiple mics at once so as his actors are delivering their lines you'll get one person saying one thing another person talking at the same time as them as they saying something else and someone even louder coming and over top here he's decentralizing our focus and allowing us To pick someone different to listen to it each time this can really add to the longevity of his films since you can't possibly listen to every voice at the same time making each viewing experience a slightly different one the same goes for visuals I think it's like a

painting and experience it's got the only limitations are the the linear ones it has length it has its beginning and an end it takes a certain amount of time but uh the I think that ideally the Audience can look at a film emotionally get the whole thing and uh not necessarily be able to explain it to somebody else they say Hey how' you like the picture I liked it when you compare him to a filmmaker like Bergman who relies on close-ups to pull the eye towards the interiority of a character ultman is preferential towards wide

shots the closest he gets to a traditional use of closeup would be in those psychological surrealist dramas Like images and three women but for the most part his frames have a wide shallow depth of focus and he shoves as much as he can into that image an image so excessive it could really only be American Scholars have likened him to the painter Renoir although I'd say his work is less delicate than renoir's and closer to that painting that hangs across from the Mona Lisa at the Lou the wedding at Kaa which is stuffed full of

so much action that you can't possibly Take it in Allin one viewing maybe that's why everyone opts to stare at the Mona Lisa ker calls Alman style a kind of visual promiscuity arguing that promiscuity is a refusal of commitment to any one person or image it makes intimacy difficult but not impossible what she means by that is that these techniques overlapping dialogue wide shots maximalism filming through Windows achieve a distancing effect between the viewer and what they're seeing on screen Giving them the option to choose to be intimate with one subject at a time this

promiscuous style can be really overwhelming if it's placed on the wrong subject like what's immediately off-putting about popey for example is that it's a liveaction retelling of an iconic children's comic book character told Through The Eyes of a director known for his incomprehensible dialogue attention deficit camera and maximalist art Direction the power of comic book Characters is in their Simplicity repeated catchphrases isolated visuals and simple punch lines but when this is mixed together with alman's style it makes for something a little odd Robin Williams and Shelley Deval are a master class of physical comedy here

but Williams already mumbling characterization of popey is constantly drowned out in the layer dialogue of other louder characters just why I'm here is I'm looking for mepp yeah and Shelly as olive oil is directed to repeat the same phrase over and over and over again while other characters are speaking so it ends up becoming a little bit annoying pretty quickly and can take away from the action of a given scene the art Direction in this movie is amazing and so spectacular but because it's mixed with ulman's kind of realism camera work it places a bit

of a confusing atmosphere upon the film but with his less Earnest more satirical Films the style is perfect this is why we can't exactly pin down a singular stance or scathing critique in his films however satirical they may be he wants you to make a decision about his subjects this makes him the perfect director to capture the soul of America as ker writes the power in alman's films is not in melting diversity in the PLT of American culture but in the inter animation of authentically conflicting voices What is the American sensibility this is a question

at the Forefront of alman's filmography though he never falls into the Trap of giving us a clear answer Alman opens his bold but convoluted comedy Brewster McLoud with the American national anthem the film which follows a guy named Brewster who lives in the Houston Astrodome and spends his time building a contraption that he hopes one day will help him fly has some great vignettes but is overall a jumbled mess But if I could extract one clear theme from the film it's that Brewster's innocent dream of flying is constantly being corrupted by the greed around him

quite American the player and the long goodbye are both critical of Hollywood whether that's the long goodbyes unflattering portrayal of the hypocritical languid ethos of South California hippie types and the amoral World in which they live or the player's entire approach to the American Studio System Maven Mrs Miller exposes the open greed upon which the country was built and the myth of manifesting Destiny do you think they want their stockholders thinking that their management isn't imbued with all the principles of fair play and Justice the very values that make this country what it is today

that Capital cannot be raised honestly but instead through cheating gambling and the exploitation of women white men they're different well the only time They dream is when things are going their way Buffalo Bill and the Indians or sitting bolt history lesson also a revisionist western is an even more over critique of American mythology taking Buffalo Bill one of America's most iconic figures and casting him as a bumbling incompetent pompous idiot why it so dark in here hey son get down who rigs his own Wild West show to rewrite a history where the white settlers are

the heroes And Indigenous people are villains the film makes abundantly clear that in fact the opposite was true so Sittin bull is the little fell H he don't look so Savage to me it used uses Buffalo Bill's Wild West as a meta commentary on the way American Legend has been fabricated by the Hollywood mythmaking Machine you wanted to show the truth to the people why can't you accept that just once because I got a better sense of History M I was beginning to think you didn't Exist but here you are on the Glorious flesh and

what a sight for Sor eyes Buffalo Bill the thrill of my life to have invented you mash is rif with references to American pop culture and is distinctly American in the way it approaches the war happily distracted and largely undisturbed by a conflict happening just a mile away one that's never seen or heard across the board alman's films seem to tap into the peculiarities of American culture excessive money obsessed brainwashed mediatized desperately lonely and undeniably full of life but no film of his embodies these qualities quite as well as Nashville Nashville came to be when

United Artists who themselves owned a music company wanted to make a movie about the country western scene and approached Alman to direct it at first he was hesitant but after reading a book called ruby red about a fading country Music star and learning from a friend that this idea was implausible because quote country stars don't fade he enlisted screenwriter Jen tuxbury who he had worked with on thieves like us to write a screenplay weaving in her own experiences with visiting Nashville over the years recently Tim Walls gave an interview in which he spoke about where

Americans believe the true Spirit of their country really comes from when George W Bush was winning in in ' 04 Right Democrats were losing the Heartland right you know if you're in California you're not in the you're not in the Heartland there's a sense of part the Midwest as that's where people are normal then they get sort of weirder on the coast they get you in the South real America Alman himself from the Heartland seemed to know this when he chose Tennessee as the subject of his film The Nashville he and tuxbury paint for us

is Overflow with life and full of Contradictions bustling chaotic nostalgic brazenly artificial deeply religious loud remote United Artists was so wary about Al man's plans to have the actors write their own songs and his stubborn commitment to having the film end in Murder that they his agent George Leo and art director Paulie Platt backed out luckily the ABC company stepped in to produce the movie for 3 million so long as their own record company could Market the film soundtrack that's a lot Of faith in your actors thankfully it was a good risk to take Nashville

brought something completely unprecedented to the world of film a decentralized winding cinematic experience with alman's roaming camera placing a documentary as lens onto a cacophony of characters colliding into each other among them there's a white gospel singer and mother of two deaf Sons lanaa played by Lily Tomlin who catches the eye of Tom Frank the member Of an incestuous Fleetwood max style fol rock group there's a baddy BBC Radio correspondent who weaves in and out of the story chasing stars and frequently making Politically Incorrect remarks there are the country stars like the pompus Haven Hamilton

and virginal Barbara jeene and under them a slew of hopefuls like sulene and Albuquerque there's Hal Philip Walker candidate for the replacement party who we never actually see in the film but his lawyer Delbert and advanced man John serve as as surrogates and our own providing an Outsiders point of view to the chaos of the city then there are smaller characters who for the most part are played for Laughs like Kenny a mysterious visitor turned assassin or Shelley deval's character Martha a Bohemian from La who's constantly changing her appearance and is in Nashville to visit

her dying aunt but is instead cavorting with almost every male Character hi neither Kenny nor Martha have many lines and then some characters like Jeff gold Bloom's tricycle man never speak at all the film has an absurd tone to it the characters are almost obnoxiously optimistic this is evidenced from the beginning when everyone gets into a major car crash on the way back from greeting Walker at the airport and all simply sit there in their cars continuing their conversations as if nothing happened Their upbeat nature is avative of that famous Southern Charm in Hospitality but

I say obnoxious because the optimism comes across a little put on no one in this movie seems to be connecting with one another rather bulldozing along in their own worlds and kind of looking out for themselves the BBC correspondent rattles on to anyone who will listen to her never picking the appropriate audience Len's husband talks at his deaf Sons without using sign language never Really caring if they can hear him or not Martha doesn't seem to care much about any of the people she sleeps with and is more interested in how they'll make her appear

and neither does Tom who sleeps with a number of the women in the movie one of the most famous scenes is where Keith kerine who plays Tom sings a self-written song called I'm easy where he repeats the phrase I'm easy before an audience of current lovers all of whom think the song is about them until they Realize it's actually about lanaa this would be romantic except all the while he's openly revealing that he has no true ties to anyone when he and Lena finally consummate we get this hilarious exchange where after lanaa tells him she

has to leave he immediately calls another one of his women before she's even fully dressed and at the door listen can you come down here where tonight Barbara Jee herself is a figure who represents how Lonesome it is at the Top clearly in no condition to continue her career but surrounded by people like her pushy husband manager who do not have her best interest at heart ultimately Nashville really captures hyper individualistic roots of the country which has this every man for himself ideology firmly embedded within it the film is about this community a scene yet

no one seems to really know or care about one another when we see all of the performers on stage together at The gala and all the adjacent people standing in the crowd to watch they all feel like they belong to different movies as scholar Chris Durham argues Nashville's alienated Community becomes a metaphor for The Wider national population alien ated and dislocated split apart by ideological fragmentation and fundamentally disenchanted with America and all of this social dislocation and distractedness is the perfect environment for a populist Movement to grow which is where Hal Philip Walker comes in

John clearly thinks of the people of Nashville as a backwards people espousing all the stereotypes that people from the Heartland seem to think about the coastal Elites like walls spoke about he misses no words that Walker is running his campaign on populist ideals he'll change his tune depending on the popular Sentiments of the working people in a cynical attempt to convince everyone That he's one of them when in reality he isn't which is what makes it so bizarre that the character Alman chooses to kill off at the end of the film is not Walker whose

presence we've been anticipating for the entire film and whose assassination is continuously foreshadowed only time I ever went H wild around the B was for the Kennedy boards Olman himself said about the ending that everyone assumed it would be the political candidate who was Assassinated because that's something we can except we buy that but he shot the Entertainer and we don't know why but we do in the Nashville of this film the true so-called heroes are the country and western singers who've developed a cult of worship around them and who serve as symbols for the

health of the city it's like the high school footballers in the Texas town of Friday Night Lights or Buffalo Bill in his Wild West show in American society it's not Politicians but folk Heroes like these who truly have influence and the the killing of Barbara jeene and not how Philip Walker is a very prophetic commentary on America's problem with idol worship one that I'm not even sure Alman knew the importance of 5 years after Nashville came out John lennin was Shaw down on his doorstep later in 1989 came the killing of television actress Rebecca schaer

and the attempted killing of borc half a decade after that all Bursts of spontaneous senseless violence against folk Heroes when Barbara G is shot Haven Hamilton who has been a generally self-absorbed character for the duration of the film selflessly throws himself over her body in an attempt to protect her he then cries out this isn't Dallas it's Nashville and as Durham remarks about this moment when Haven Hamilton defiantly States this is Nashville rather than Dallas an unfortunate and Traumatic reality is laid bare this is indeed Nashville but it is very much also the United States

of America in such a heavily mediatized Society the line between celebrity and politician begins to blur celebrities are gunned down as if they were political figures and political figures cultivate giddy fandoms as if they were celebrities and so really the movie in many ways predicts the phenomenon of Donald Trump a person who embodies the dangerous Merging of these two identities a cynical populist like Hal Philip Walker trained in the art of celebrity and idol worship like Barbara Jean whose rise to power signals the potential end of American democracy as we know it like I said

Nashville was a risk that paid off for all its kooky unconventional approaches to storytelling the film came at a good time one not so different from the time we're in today America was finally Coming out of the two decade long disastrous war in Vietnam and still recovering from the shock of Watergate both events that had shaken public trust in the government as the bicentennial the country's 200th anniversary celebration approached patriotism was at an all-time low and out of the already challenging wave of films coming out during this new Hollywood era Nashville's very literal snapshot of

a country on the brink just patching Itself together enough to keep moving was exactly what Americans wanted I think this quote by ker sums it up best we learned from the work of Robert Alman that we can only rightly ask how individual Americans include in their consciousness of self the knowledge of racism of the corruption of the American dream of extraordinary violence and yet remain Americans Nashville answers this with a steady dose of Insanity while the film didn't make the Biggest returns at the box office it received five Academy Award nominations including best picture it

was looking like alman's career would finally reach an equilibrium in his book Robert Alman Hollywood Survivor Daniel O'Brien writes halfway through the most productive phase of his career Alman had come tantalizingly close to reestablishing himself as a commercial director in the event Nashville attracted enough Acclaim to place Alman in good standing with the Big studios his career was still in good health the operative word here being close but not close [Music] enough with the success of Nashville one would think mman was finally establishing himself as a commercial director again but while the 1970s are largely

regarded as the Heyday of alman's career it was not without its own string of flops starting with Bruce McLoud even after Nashville other films In the' 70s like Buffalo Bill and the Indians quintet and a perfect wedding weren't the success as Alman hoped they would be but none of these flops were enough to knock him down and then he came out with poy in 1980 although poey has been redeemed in the decade since and was quite a hit with young children it was considered such a Monumental nightmare by the studio and Alman too risky and

challenging a director that he was blacklisted in Hollywood he sold Lion's gate and ret readed into making smaller scale films based on well-known plays later moving to Paris where he mostly worked in television for the remainder of the decade not having another critical hit until the player in 1992 and then again with shortcuts in the following year but again there's something that feels oddly frantic and vulnerable about Popeye which even if you dislike the movie is hard to ignore and I think this speaks to alman's Larger filmography popy belies this voracious work ethic a sort

of hunger on the part of Al that kept him working all those years despite his failures you know these films are like children to me and you tend to love your least successful children the most but they are complete they are what they are and U I like them all all of them yeah indeed and uh so it's to me it's all the same thing I've always felt my life's always been in one Straight line and everybody else is kind of crisscrossing the occasionally alman's wartime crew used to tell this story about how Alman had

to abandon his plane in the Sea on the way back from a mission to New Guinea they said that he was well on his way back to shore safely away from the plane when he remembered a pack of cigaretts that he left on the sinking aircraft and swam all the way back to go get them his biographer mcgilligan writes that what his crew Remembered about this moment was that he was someone who managed to have a good time and look out for himself no matter what the Peril he was a bit of a survivor in

a way as danks observes The Wonder of alman's career and his resilient reputation was his ability to keep producing work no matter the critical and Commercial response to his earlier or immediately prior Creations also remarkable were the seemingly endless array of producers financiers Studios of various sizes and configurations and collaborators who wanted to work with him despite the general lack of Commercial Success that met the overwhelming majority of his 37 feature films in a way I think Alman is a lot like some of his most famous protagonists characters like gold Marlo or macabe aren't really

Heroes and we shouldn't treat them as such Alman wasn't interested in mythology like that anyway rather they're like Wy survivors With occasional Strokes of Genius or prowess stumbling as they go but pushing on through the very end one scholar Robert kuler even saw parall between Alman and his fictionalized version of Richard Nixon in the one room drama secret honor I would not suggest that Alman of all people identifies with Richard Nixon but rather that the final outcry of that paranoid figure created by ultman carries unfolded within its hysteria some of the very calm Non-paranoid Defiance

expressed in alman's own work and career ultman earns his title of Maverick filmmaker because he was able to make one critical and Commercial flop after another for basically the entirety of his career yet the conviction of his style method and audacity kept him more or less afloat as a highly respected director until his death in 2006 O'Brien ends his book with a quote that I think is fitting for this video Too the only only ending I know of is death at the end of Nashville when Albuquerque picks up the mic and begins to sing it

don't worry me a song as aptly titled as suicide is painless at the beginning of mash the people in the crowd begin to dance and sing along completely unbothered by the violence they just witnessed the killing of their beloved folk hero why because another one emerged as quickly as Barbara jeene had left so what is there to be worried About really it don't worry me and I think this Mantra is very befitting of a person like ultman he was the perfect American director Full of paradoxes authoritarian but collaborative and anti-oral ambitious but an outsider excessive

but introspective empathetic but satirical and misogynistic violent but pacifistic grumpy but bullheaded optimistic it's just as easy to love Alman as it is to hate him he could be a terror but he was also capable of Producing some of the most empathetic and authentic art his country has to offer and what better way to represent America as a Canadian it's a country that can be infuriating to live next to one that constantly befuddles the International Community but it's also one I'm trying to move to and that I can't help of being enamored by a times

in spite of myself and that's Alman understand it's Awful let me be the want to Robert Alman was known for pushing boundaries with his film making but there are other filmmakers who take those boundaries and just throw them right out the window my series taboo on screen is about these filmmakers people who take the concept of subversive to a whole other level showing us the ugly morally gray and taboo aspects of humanity and in doing so attempt to crack open our World Views successfully Or not you can you can find Tabo on screen exclusively on

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