Robert Altman, 81

Robert Altman, realizador de cinema, morreu a 21 de Novembro de 2006, em Los Angeles, vítima de leucemia. Tinha nascido a 20 de Fevereiro de 1925 em Kansas City (Missouri). Esta é a nota publicada pelo Economist.

Robert Altman
The long goodbye
The Economist Nov 23rd 2006

Huge casts and overlapping dialogue characterised Robert Altman's films

ROBERT ALTMAN discovered the secret of longevity in Hollywood: work fast and never pause to assess the impact of one film before starting another. If an Altman movie bombed—and he had some turkeys in his time—he generally had another already in production or about to open. In this way he was always one step ahead of the flak.
Altman was renowned for marshalling large casts and encouraging them to deliver lines, not in sequence but simultaneously. The result was a leap forward for cinematic realism. Dialogue overlapped and was interrupted in a way that often happens in life but had seldom been encountered on screen. This was heard at its best in such films as “Nashville” (1975) and “Short Cuts” (1993), where, with a teeming cast of characters, he contrived in just two cities—Nashville and Los Angeles—to convey an impressionistic portrait of America itself at those junctures.
In the early 1950s, he made various documentaries, including “The James Dean Story”. In his last work, which opened more than 50 years later in May this year, he joined forces with Garrison Keillor to bring “A Prairie Home Companion” to the screen. Altman made big films, like his trenchant Hollywood satire “The Player” (1992), small ones like the now almost forgotten “Thieves Like Us” (1974) and frankly experimental ones such as “3 Women” (1977). He even ventured into science fiction—early in his career with “Countdown” (1968) and later with his 1979 film “Quintet”, which imagines America in the grip of some future ice age.
It was a huge career, extending beyond cinema to television (in the Tanner series) and even the theatre. His stage work, however, was not successful and was fiercely criticised. He experienced a humiliating flop when Kevin Spacey invited him to stage a little known Arthur Miller play, “Resurrection Blues”, earlier this year at London's Old Vic theatre. In effect Altman allowed the cast to stroll through the production with minimal guidance. The penalty came in the form of blistering reviews and an early closure, leaving the venerable old theatre dark for several months.
The very diversity of his films—war comedy in “M*A*S*H”, a Western in “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, comic-strip humour in “Popeye”, lunatic improvisation in “Health”—may in the end count against his long-term reputation. There seemed to be no common thread or theme to Altman's films. He was a director of other people's work, not an artist in his own right. No shame in that, of course. William Wyler, after all, was of the same ilk and nobody would disparage “The Best Years of Our Lives”. But in the end it is the Chaplins and the Stroheims who are the more respected directors, men whose whole career mirrors their view of the world. Altman will be remembered, not so much for what he said but for how he said it.