Download or read book Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling written by Mark Minett and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cinema of Robert Altman written by Robert Niemi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Robert Altman and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the unpredictable and controversial filmmaker of M.A.S.H., Nashville, and Short Cuts
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Daniel O'Brien and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1995 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few careers in Hollywood can match the highs and lows of Robert Altman's. In the past several years, The Player, and Short Cuts especially have seen the director - who has been written off time and again - emerge as a major creative force. (Critical reception of Ready to Wear, his latest film, also fits the pattern of Altman's career.). O'Brien explores the causes for Altman's rise and fall from critical acclaim, as well as the director's unconventional attitudes to the film-making process, which may have left him better equipped than many to adjust to the bitter realities of the Hollywood film industry. He is a true Hollywood survivor. Altman's comeback in the 1990s, and the accompanying reappraisal of his earlier work, is fully discussed and documented, right up to the present. By exploring a rich and varied career, this book reveals Robert Altman's unique position in American culture and world cinema.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Mitchell Zuckoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman—visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend—comes roaring to life in this rollicking oral biography. After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with M*A*S*H. He reinvented American filmmaking, and went on to produce such masterpieces as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. In Robert Altman, Mitchell Zuckoff has woven together Altman’s final interviews; an incredible cast of voices including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, among scores of others; and contemporary reviews and news accounts into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life.
Download or read book Altman on Altman written by David Thompson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Altman and After written by Peter F. Parshall and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American cinema, films with multiple plots can be traced back to Grand Hotel in 1932, but the form was used only sporadically in subsequent decades. However, filmmakers of the 1970s and 80s, notably Robert Altman and Woody Allen, repeatedly employed complex narratives to weave sprawling stories in their films. Later filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Paul Haggis embraced multiple plotlines, a device that eventually achieved mainstream respectability in such Oscar winners as Traffic and Crash. In the past two decades, more than 200 films utilizing some variation of this format have appeared worldwide. In Altman and After: Multiple Narratives in Film, Peter Parshall carefully examines films that feature various plotlines. Parshall asserts that although this form may lose some of the close psychological identification and forward drive of linear narratives, such films gain a corresponding strength by developing thematic relationships in the various story lines. In each of these chapters, Parshall examines a different example of the multi-plot form, such as network narrative and the multiple-draft narrative, demonstrating that the structure of each is central to their artistry. He also argues that these devices open up a variety of creative vistas, a strength that appeals to directors and audiences alike. Films studied in this book include Nashville, Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, The Double Life of Veronique, and Run Lola Run. A long overdue examination of this unique cinematic form, Altman and After will appeal to scholars, students, and fans eager to learn more about complex-narrative films.
Download or read book Storytelling in the New Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-05 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of films from the 1920s to the 1990s—from Keaton’s Our Hospitality to Casablanca to Terminator 2, Kristin Thompson offers the first in-depth analysis of Hollywood’s storytelling techniques and how they are used to make complex, easily comprehensible, entertaining films.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Frank Caso and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Rick Armstrong and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Altman Text Only Edition written by Kathryn Reed Altman and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intimate and critical biography of the pioneering director explores his life, work, and creative process—with contributions by fellow filmmakers. For decades, Robert Altman fascinated audiences with films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Gosford Park, and many others. He won critical acclaim by combining technical innovation with subversive, satirical humor and impassioned political engagement. His ability to explore so many different worlds with a single vision changed the landscape of cinema forever. This signature "Altmanesque" style is, in the words of Martin Scorsese: "as recognizable and familiar as Renoir's brushstrokes or Debussy's orchestrations." Now, the Altman estate opens its archive to celebrate his extraordinary life and career in this authorized biography. Written by Altman’s widow Kathryn Reed Altman and film critic Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, this volume brims with personal recollections of the director. Alongside the intimate story of his life is a complete historical and critical narrative of Altman’s films and his process. To honor the Altman trademark of using a wide cast of characters, Altman also features contributions from his collaborators and contemporaries including Frank Barhydt, E. L. Doctorow, Roger Ebert, Jules Feiffer, Julian Fellowes, James Franco, Tess Gallagher, Pauline Kael, Garrison Keillor, Michael Murphy, Martin Scorsese, Lily Tomlin, Alan Rudolph, Michael Tolkin, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Download or read book The Way Hollywood Tells It written by David Bordwell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-04-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today’s bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition—one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like Jerry Maguire and Love Actually to more imposing efforts like A Beautiful Mind. He also draws upon testimony from writers, directors, and editors who are acutely conscious of employing proven principles of plot and visual style. Within the limits of the "classical" approach, innovation can flourish. Bordwell examines how imaginative filmmakers have pushed the premises of the system in films such as JFK, Memento, and Magnolia. He discusses generational, technological, and economic factors leading to stability and change in Hollywood cinema and includes close analyses of selected shots and sequences. As it ranges across four decades, examining classics like American Graffiti and The Godfather as well as recent success like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, this book provides a vivid and engaging interpretation of how Hollywood moviemakers have created a vigorous, resourceful tradition of cinematic storytelling that continues to engage audiences around the world.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Virginia Wright Wexman and published by Hall Reference Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Gerard Plecki and published by Boston : Twayne. This book was released on 1985 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Patrick McGilligan and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1989-07-15 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prodigal, prolific, and visionary director to emerge from post-sixties Hollywood, Robert Altman is a man whose mystique sometimes threatens to overshadow his many critically acclaimed films (including MASH).
Download or read book The Films of Robert Altman written by Alan Karp and published by Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hollywood Planet written by Scott Robert Olson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1999-06-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity of American television programs and feature films in the international marketplace is widely recognized but scarcely understood. Existing studies have not sufficiently explained the global power of the American media nor its actual effects. In this volume, Scott Robert Olson tackles the issue head on, establishing his thesis that the United States' competitive advantage in the creation and global distribution of popular taste is due to a unique mix of cultural conditions that are conducive to the creation of "transparent" texts--narratives whose inherent polysemy encourage diverse populations to read them as though they are indigenous. Olson posits that these narratives have meaning to so many different cultures because they allow viewers in those cultures to project their own values, archetypes, and tropes into the movie or television program in a way that texts imported from other cultures do not, thus enabling the import to function as though it were an indigenous product. As an innovative volume combining postcolonial and postmodern theory with global management strategic theory, Hollywood Planet is one of the first studies that attempts to account theoretically for numerous recent ethnographic studies that suggest different interpretations of television programs and film by a variety of international audiences. Relevant to studies in media theory and other areas of the communication discipline, as well as anthropology, sociology, and related fields, Hollywood Planet contains a powerful and original argument to explain the dominance of American media in the global entertainment market.
