The man on the left of the photograph is 81. He has just made what will prove to be his last film.

I like this image, taken at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. Look at Altman’s eyes – alert, questioning, acerbic, his gaze hunting the room while the others stand in a docile, ceremonial line.

I filed this story for Screen Hub today. Trying to define Robert Altman is a ridiculous task, but at least it carries some good links.

‘These events took place… But not in the way you’ve been told. I wanted to look at it through a different window, you might say, but I still wanted to keep the poetry in the ballad.’ Now Robert Altman is dead.

Hardly unpredictable, this is still a momentous event. In the cinema as we know it in the English language, he was the great creator of play, the prophet of loose.

Every trick and plan we have, every insight about what we want and the audience needs, has to be tested against the accumulated work of Robert Altman. He’ll contradict us every time, remind us that every idea has an opposite and the opposite is also true.

He had a passion for excess, huge energy, and a gargantuan ability to absorb punishment and come back. He was forty five before he made a mainstream feature, after trying twice before to claim his place in Hollywood. Each time he went back to making “industrials”, and directing fine episodes of television.

A true iconoclast, he understood film so well his defiance advanced the art of cinema. He knew so much, he could give away control. He was so grounded in the form he could relax into the moment. He knew how to share authorship – although he was famously (and meanly) snarky about writers. As Shelly Duvall said:

“Working with Bob is a family affair… People love him, and you won’t hear that kind of endearment about other directors.”

He said of Hollywood: “They make shoes and I make gloves.” Even so, he was finally able to say, at his one Oscar speech (given for a career, not a film):

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have. I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

There are good obituaries at The Guardian and International Herald Tribune. The Variety obituary is more prosaic, but good on the career details.

There is a fine blog commentary on The House Next Door, part of a tribute in March for his Oscar.

Here is the Variety description of his background:

“Born on Feb. 20, 1925, Altman was educated in Jesuit schools before joining the Army in 1943. He flew 46 missions as a bomber pilot over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. After his discharge he attended the U. of Missouri and began making industrial films for the Calvin Co. in his native Kansas City.

During the ’50s, he came to Hollywood twice in search of a feature career. And twice he went back home. In 1957 he persuaded United Artists to release a feature, “The Delinquents,” he’d shot in his hometown with Tom Laughlin in a leading role. It was released to only fair reviews, but it led to Warner Bros. hiring Altman to co-direct the docu “The James Dean Story,” which earned good notices.

However, it was his last feature credit for a decade. Altman threw his energies into TV, where he worked steadily on a host of popular series. He was first engaged as a director on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”; among the many other shows he did were “Whirlybirds,” “Bonanza,” “The Roaring Twenties,” “Combat,” “Suspense Theater,” “Route 66″ and “Kraft Theater.”

He was responsible for some 300 hours of television as a producer, writer and director. Weary of the grind, he snagged a directing chore on a 1968 melodrama for Warner Bros. called “Countdown,”‘ starring the relatively unknown Robert Duvall, James Caan, Ted Knight and an actor who was later to become part of the director’s stable of performers, Michael Murphy.

He was fired from the film by studio head Jack Warner, and Altman later quoted Warner as saying, “That fool has actors talking at the same time,” indicating there was little appreciation early on for one of the techniques that would bring him acclaim a few years later.

The recut film was released in 1968 to bad reviews. But by then Altman was on to his second film, psychological melodrama “That Cold Day in the Park,” with Sandy Dennis, which went nowhere.

More than a dozen directors turned down the job of helming a low-budget wartime comedy for 20th Century Fox based on a novel by Richard Hooker, a surgeon who served in the Korean conflict. Finally, Altman agreed to direct “MASH,” an irreverent look at renegade medics during the Korean War. …”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 8:32 pm and is filed under history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.