Improvisation, Transposition, and Elaboration

Chapter 4 jettisons the standard account of Altman’s “transpositional” script-to-screen strategy, in which he is said to have casually discarded the script in favor of the anarchic possibilities of communal filmmaking. Comparing preproduction scripts with final films, this chapter clearly establishes these films’ “improvisatory ceilings,” revealing the extent to which Altman’s approach depends on retaining rather than rejecting his scripts’ scenic and narrative structures. It is around these causal chains that Altman economizes, rejecting redundancy as well as thematic and dramatic cliché. This makes room for multiple forms of elaboration—including constrained versions of the improvisatory flourishes and reimagining of character traits that underwrite his reputation, but also involving the improvisation of thematic motifs, the multiplication of “middleground” characters, and the creation of affordances for favored stylistic techniques. While Altman’s practices are remarkably consistent throughout the early 1970s, later scripts display interesting innovations anticipating and accommodating Altman’s practice-oriented preferences.

The Effects of Task and Multifunction Display Characteristics on Pilot Viewport Allocation Strategy

Twenty pilots searched through a 280 screen hierarchically organized data base of flight information in single task conditions, and in dual-task conditions which required concurrent monitoring of an altitude variable. Two screens were available that could either be shared between the two tasks, or fully allocated to the information access task (IAT). Search questions varied in the distance in the data base that needed to be traversed and in the extent to which they required working memory to integrate information between two screens. Subjects performed the dual task trials under either information or monitoring task emphasis, and when the monitoring task was either low or high bandwidth. The results indicated that longer single task traversals resulted from integration problems, from more distant nodes, and from nodes that shared the same top level of the hierarchy. The dual task results indicated that a measured strategic variable which facilitated performance on the IAT (the devotion of both screens to that task) was modulated as the IAT became more difficult with integration questions, as the IAT was emphasized, and as the monitoring task was at lower bandwidth. However, the result revealed that pilots failed to consider the length of the data base navigational path in their choice of single versus dual screen strategy.