In Altman on Altman, one of American cinema's most incorrigible mavericks reflects on a brilliant career. Robert Altman served a long apprenticeship in movie-making before his great breakthrough, the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1969). It became a huge hit and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but also established Altman's inimitable use of sound and image, and his gift for handling a repertory company of actors. The 1970s then became Altman's decade, with a string of masterpieces: McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Nashville . . . In the 1980s Altman struggled to fund his work, but he was restored to prominence in 1992 with The Player, an acerbic take on Hollywood. Short Cuts, an inspired adaptation of Raymond Carver, and the Oscar-winning Gosford Park, underscored his comeback. Now he recalls the highs and lows of his career trajectory to David Thompson in this definitive interview book, part of Faber's widely acclaimed Directors on Directors series. 'Hearing in his own words in Altman on Altman just how much of his films occur spontaneously, as a result of last-minute decisions on set, is fascinating . . . For film lovers, this is just about indispensable.' Ben Sloan, Metro London

The life and work of motion picture director Robert Altman (1925-2006) are interpreted from a variety of perspectives in this collection of essays. Actors, historians, film scholars, and cultural theorists reflect on Altman and his five-decade career and discuss the significance of music, history and genre in his films. Two actors who have appeared in some of the filmmaker's most important works are prominently represented, with a statement from Elliot Gould (MASH, The Long Goodbye, California Split) and an essay by Michael Murphy (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Tanner '88). The collection ends with an essay on the importance of death in the director's final productions The Company (2003) and Prairie Home Companion (2006) by noted Altman scholar Robert T. Self.

Known as an iconoclast and maverick, film director Robert Altman has consistently pushed against the boundaries of genre. From refashioning film noir in The Long Goodbye, the western in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the psychological drama in Images, science fiction in Quintet, and the romantic comedy in A Perfect Couple, he has always tested the limits of what film can and should do. In this book, Frank Caso examines the development of Altman’s artistic method from his earliest days in industrial film to his work in television and feature films. Altman is one of those directors whose films audiences can easily recognize, but what exactly are the distinctive elements that have become his signature? Caso identifies more than twenty such elements in Altman’s style, tracing some—such as his use of free-hand cameras and engagement with Christian imagery—to the beginning of his career. Caso also examines Altman’s unsettling mix of offbeat comedic tone with a predominance of violence, murder, and death, showing how their counterpointing effects rendered his films at once naturalistic and otherworldly. Exploring these and other aspects of the Altmanesque style, Caso maps the innovations that have made Altman a master filmmaker. Enriched with illustration throughout, Robert Altman will appeal to fans of this distinctive American auteur or anyone interested in ground-breaking cinema.

A Companion to Robert Altman presents myriad aspects of Altman’s life, career, influence and historical context. This book features 23 essays from a range of experts in the field, providing extensive coverage of these aspects and dimensions of Altman’s work. The most expansive and wide-ranging book yet published on Altman, providing a comprehensive account of Altman’s complete career Provides discussion and analysis of generally neglected aspects of Altman’s career, including the significance of his work in television and industrial film, the importance of collaboration, and the full range and import of his aesthetic innovations Includes essays by key scholars in “Altman studies”, bringing together experts in the field, emerging scholars and writers from a broad range of fields Multi-disciplinary in design and draws on a range of approaches to Altman’s work, being the first substantial publication to make use of the recently launched Robert Altman Archive at the University of Michigan Offers specific insights into particular aspects of film style and their application, industrial and aesthetic film and TV history, and particular areas such as the theorisation of space, place, authorship and gender

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 an 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 upon 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.

Collected interviews with the unpredictable and controversial filmmaker of M.A.S.H., Nashville, and Short Cuts

American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protégé Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book considers the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.

In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing authoritative to say about the state of contemporary society, this volume surveys all of his major films in their sociohistorical context to reposition the director as a trenchant satirist and social critic of postmodern America, depicted as a lonely wasteland of fraudulent spectacle, exploitative social relations, and unfulfilled solitaries in search of elusive community.