Short Cuts: Dos modos diferentes de aproximación

En este trabajo se hace un análisis comparativo entre un conjunto de relatos breves del escritor Raymond Carver (1994), publicados desde principios de los años setenta, y su correspondiente versión cinemato gráfica en un argumento unificado por el director Robert Altman bajo el título Short Cuts (1992) A la luz de este ejemplo, se examinan aspectos relativos a las diferencias en la técnica narrativa entre litera tura y cine, así como los modos de aproximación a la realidad social y psicológica de los personajes practicados por ambos medios.

A aliança de classes e o nascimento de uma nação em Cerimônia de casamento

Este ensaio traz uma análise do filme Cerimônia de casamento (1978) do cineasta Robert Altman, na qual se procura argumentar que os diálogos estabelecidos no filme entre a história do cinema e a literatura produzem uma reflexão sobre a matéria histórica do momento em que o filme foi produzido. Mais especificamente, procura-se demonstrar que o filme faz uma apanhado crítico sobre o ascenso de ideologias conservadoras a partir de meados dos anos 1970.

La Coupure et la paranoïa de l’acte meurtrier. Entre Altman et Buñuel

"The Cut and the Paranoia of the Killing Act. Between Altman and Buñuel. This paper aims to explore the psychoanalytic roots and affinities in Robert Altman and Luis Buñuel with respect to the mechanisms of the constitution of the subject. More specifically, I approach the function of the cut as both a mark of the subject and within a so-called paranoid act. Thus, in a Lacanian interpretation, the cut involves topology, the relation with the object, separation and alienation and, ultimately, the pure loss. Key words: cut, act, paranoia, killing, Altman, Buñuel."

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs a historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman’s filmmaking history and profile—lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate on their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman’s work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

Modern Times: Geraldine Chaplin across contemporary cinema

In the biopic Chaplin (1992), Geraldine Chaplin plays her own grandmother. This is the role that, in owing perhaps to the novelty of a film star playing her own relation, is perhaps the most widely seen of Geraldine Chaplin’s performances. And it reminds us that like her father, Geraldine, although perhaps mostly remembered by film enthusiasts for her work in films by Carlos Saura, Jacques Rivette, and Robert Altman, has spent much of her career negotiating the rather less sympathetic strictures of the commercial film industry. Where much of the book up to this point focuses on Geraldine Chaplin’s presence in various national and transnational art cinemas, this final chapter deepens our sense of her screen persona by looking at several of her most important films made outside of the context of the earlier chapters. Using the motif of the close-up as a point of departure, the film analyses Chaplin’s contemporary performances for numerous directors, including Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Birkin, Guy Maddin, Richard Lester, and more.

The Circus: Geraldine Chaplin in the cinemas of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph

In many of her American films, Geraldine Chaplin is figured in self-reflexive stories about stardom and self-image, particularly in the films directed by Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph in the 1970s and 1980s: Altman’s Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and A Wedding (1978); and Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. (1976), Remember My Name (1978), and The Moderns (1988). In these films, as discussed in this chapter, Chaplin develops a distinctive presence, tapping into her already established persona from the 1960s but in now frequently ironic and self-reflexive ways. Perhaps the best example of this intriguing development in her persona is Chaplin’s role as Opal in Altman’s Nashville, its massive ensemble cast suggestive of a kind of performative circus. Opal, this chapter argues, is a thoroughly ironic variation of the kind of privileged character Chaplin played in some of her 1960s films.

Robert Altman

Robert Altman helped define New Hollywood cinema with the dark comedy film MASH in 1970 and helped close out the era with the surreal 3 Women in 1977. But Altman was an unlikely New Hollywood icon; New Hollywood auteurs were supposed to be young movie brats straight from film school, whereas Altman was a forty-something autodidact who had learned his craft making industrial and educational pictures. This chapter focuses on three of Altman’s most important and influential films: the 1971 western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which builds extraordinary emotional power while radically revising both the myth of the frontier and a key Hollywood genre; the 1975 musical Nashville, a large-canvas portrait of modern-day American politics, patriotism, popular culture, and celebrity; and the oneiric 3 Women, a small-canvas dreamscape that marks the outer limits of New Hollywood iconoclasm.