Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...released. Altman's movies are subversive--not because they tell us what to think, but because they make it impossible for us to remain settled in our comfortable old beliefs. They expose the tangled, jury-rigged pulleys and levers that operated behind the quiet, smooth facades of the old Hollywood myth machines. The exposed machines still work, but the illusion of smooth magic has disappeared; their contrivedness is obvious...
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...
Klute. In 1971, Jane Fonda won an Oscar for this film. She didn't work in Hollywood again until 1976. It's good to have you back, Jane, but Klute almost sustained us through those barren years. Somehow thrillers where the characters matter seem richer in atmosphere and tension--and Fonda's Bree Daniels, the call-girl who is the object of a shadowy killer, involves us so totally that the girl-in-the-abandoned-warehouse routine at the end doesn't even appear schematic (well, it does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan...