Word: altmans
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...themes of Altman's movies are at variance with American movies' traditional approach to the American experience, they're reinforced by his structure and technique. Unlike most American films, which proceed in straight narrative fashion, Altman's films evolve out of chaos. Instead of leading the viewer down a single path to an inevitable conclusion, Altman presents him with brief glimpses and seemingly unrelated vignettes--the connections become apparent only gradually as the film progresses. The outcomes of Altman's films aren't obviously preordained; they apparently develop out of the vicissitudes of real life...
This naturalistic quality of Altman's films is enhanced by his unconventional audio and visual techniques. With their overlapping voices and background noise, Altman's soundtracks have the thick texture of real world sound. Typical Hollywood soundtracks, with their neatly interspersed voices and carefully dubbed-in background music, sound contrived in comparison--almost sterile. Similarly, Altman relies heavily on long and medium camera shots, avoiding the manipulative feel of most Hollywood products. Altman's frames include the things he wants you to see, but he doesn't overemphasize them; he lets you observe for yourself...
...Altman's naturalistic technique also permits him to parody Hollywood's audio and visual cliches. The imposing shots of the Corelli mansion in A Wedding, and the fanfare that accompanies them, are hilarious precisely because their contrived portentousness contrasts so dramatically with the look and sound of the rest of the film...
...Altman has rendered ludicrous some overused Hollywood techniques of establishing mood and tone, he has developed and refined others. His use of color is particularly striking. The monochromatic brown shading of McCabe and Mrs. Miller conveys the cold bleakness of the northwestern frontier, and the blue tones of The Long Goodbye are appropriate to the twilight world inhabited by Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Altman's most effective, moving use of color to establish mood is in Thieves Like Us (1974), a beautiful, elegiac story of innocent young love in the Depression-era South. He saturates his images with green and yellow...
Thieves Like Us is an appropriate note on which to end an appreciation of Robert Altman's work; Altman couldn't have made this lucid, subtle film--which altogether ignores American movie myths--without first shattering those myths in films like M*A*S*H*, McCabe and The Long Goodbye. In retrospect, it's clear that Altman has helped American movies move beyond the stifling conventions of the genre to focus on ordinary people whose lives are important in their own right. He's given American movies room to breathe...