Images

Written shortly after the Perfect Couple comment:

I am continuing to fill in my Altman gaps. Images is another striking, important, neglected film, although about as different as you could imagine from my other recent Altman rediscovery, A Perfect Couple. One of the ways in which it is different is subtle. A Perfect Couple is a "sport," both within film history and within Altman's oeuvre. Its closest filmic relations, and they are not even that close, are with other Altman films; but essentially, it is out there on its own, a glorious oddity, of uncertain parentage and with no progeny.

Images, despite its obscurity and persistent non-availability, is situated quite differently: it is connected in a dozen ways to other films and film-makers; it has obvious parents and children; it is deeply embedded in both film history and its particular cinematic moment.

Images focuses intensely on the mental breakdown of an upper middle class woman played by Susannah York, and takes place largely at a remote country house in a magnificent Irish landscape. Psychological thrillers and psychological art films were something of a rage in the Sixties and Seventies. Altman has admitted explicitly that Bergman's Persona was his starting-point and is in "the DNA" of Images. Patrick McGilligan in his Altman biography Jumping Off the Cliff states that:

Altman has said that, with Images, he wanted to make a Joseph Losey- type film. Losey was one of those few film directors, like Huston and Welles, whom Altman would admit to admiring.

Losey, a great and singularly under-rated director, is worthy of Altman's admiration, and Images indeed bears the Losey stamp. It also has a good deal of Polanski in it (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby; there are also strong affinities with The Tenant, which postdates Images).

A line can be drawn from Images, backward or forward, to almost any film that depicts mental instability largely from a mentally unstable protagonist's point of view (Barton Fink and A Beautiful Mind, to cite two wildly different examples).

McGilligan also positions the film in a quartet of Altman projects having to do with unstable women: That Cold Day in the Park; Images; Three Women; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Another affinity is with other highly polished, stylized, sharply and precisely visualized and auralized films: Losey fits there, so does Nicolas Roeg, and I was strongly reminded of Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette. Images, like Chinese Roulette, uses plenty of glittering glass, mirror, and crystal imagery. The cinematography of the justly celebrated Vilmos Zsigmond is eye-popping, both in the tricky-to-film interiors and the hypnotic landscape exteriors.

Images also shares its DNA (love that phrase of Altman's!) with, and perhaps even exerted a direct influence upon, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, made just a few years later. Images might very well have played theatrically in Australia; a number of Altman films seem to have had better distribution abroad than in the United States.

Altman never made a visually and dramatically tighter film than this; his famed looseness is nowhere in evidence. With a cast of only six and the isolated setting, Images does play like one of Bergman's famously tight chamber films; it's reminiscent not just of Persona in that respect, but also of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and others.

The actual title on the film's title-frame is Robert Altman's Images, which is a gambit reminiscent of Fellini and is as acutely self-reflexive a title as any film-maker has ever dared. Robert Altman's Images, indeed! That's a signature card for his entire work.

In an interview on the Images DVD, Altman reiterates his frequently-made point that all his films are installments in an ongoing vision and that assessments of the installments as being higher or lower in quality don't matter much to him: if you're interested in the vision, you're interested in the vision, right? I think we should take Altman seriously on this: it is a challenge to us to re-frame our way of experiencing films. This is not to say that there are no differences of quality between films or that those assessments don't matter; it is to say that, once a director has shown their artistic distinction and their ability to control their projects without major compromise, everything they do is interesting and of value because it expresses their vision.

Look at most of the directors mentioned in this post: Losey, Polanski, Bergman, Fassbinder, Coen, Fellini, Roeg, Huston, Welles, Weir -- all of them have tremendous artistic distinction, all control their projects to a very large extent (certain exceptions involving studio interference easily noted), and I would therefore advance the thesis that none of them ever made a "bad" film. We need everything they have done.

This business of charting an artist's work strictly in terms of peaks and valleys is pop journalism, not serious criticism. Pauline Kael set the tone for discussion of Altman in her early reviews, which went up and down like a ping-pong ball; loved MASH, hated Brewster McCloud, loved McCabe and Mrs. Miller, hated Images (and at that point she said that since she had discerned a definite alternating hit/miss pattern, she couldn't wait for his next film). She continued on in that opinioneering way throughout his career. Kael wrote much that was interesting on Altman, but I would submit that as his biggest champion, she nonetheless misunderstood the nature of his work (and everyone else's, frankly) in some very crucial ways. This was because Pauline Kael didn't care about Robert Altman's vision, shocking as that may sound; she only cared whether she liked the particular movie, not how it fit into the pattern of the whole. That's a serious, indeed a damning flaw in a critic.