Altman-esque Gestalt: A VR Toolkit
If only the legendary filmmaker could have lived to apply his theories of directed focus to virtual reality
I equate films with sandcastles. You get a bunch of mates and say “Oh, let’s build this great sandcastle. And you build it. And if the tide comes in in twenty minutes it’s just smooth sand. And that structure you made is in everybody’s memory. And that’s it. — Robert Altman
Suddenly, it seems every filmmaker on the hustle is trying to figure out how to best use virtual reality in their filmmaking. Both Sundance and the Tribeca Film Institute have committed to educate, fund and give exposure to VR and 360 story-telling. Film festival panels and indie-film blogs are filled with lengthy discussion of VR’s power to build empathy and its immersive, interactive and social potential. But how will these new forms of creativity continue — or transform— the century-old tradition of cinema, which give or take some technological innovations, hasn’t changed significantly?
Consider the summer of 1975. The two big movies are Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the latter a blockbuster thriller and the former, well, more of a critically acclaimed slow-burner. My brother covered our basement with iconic Jaws promo posters of a gigantic shark headed towards a naked woman swimming, fueling nightmares. It was clear what that film was “about” and how to avoid it: don’t swim. A perfect premise to exploit adrenaline junkies in Jaws 3-D.
In contrast, directing your focus with a deceivingly messy, meandering style, Nashville would make a terrible 3-D movie — but like many Altman films, provides an excellent parallel to VR narrative techniques.
A couple decades after its release, I was a budding 20-year-old filmmaker declaring Nashville my favorite film “of all time.” When my brother (by now a budding law student) took that as a very strong recommendation to see the film, the difference between the Spielbergian and Altmanesque approach to story was abundantly clear from his confused phone call afterwards. “I don’t get it. What was the point of all that?”
True, in Nashville there was no clear predatorial focus necessitating a bigger boat, but instead — after more than three hours and 25 character storylines — merely a chorus singing “It don’t worry me!,” as the camera tilts back to the sky in a near exact reverse of the film’s opening shot. (In legalese: You’re exactly where you started, thank you for your time!) Like a successful VR experience, Nashville worked only if you let go and gave into immersion. I shrugged, proudly confirming to myself I was now under the tent of cinephile sophisticates that “got it,” and mumbled something about painterly gestalt.
“Virtual reality. You know what virtual means? It’s like really real. So virtual reality is practically, totally real. But not.” — Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Short Cuts”
Gestalt, a phrase borrowed from German psychology by Art Criticism and semioticians, was described by one professor as “the overall thing-ness” — a meaning articulated with a lot of wide-armed gesticulating — and accurately embraces the experiential nature of Altman’s films. Gestalt is reasonably translatable to what’s termed in technology the “user experience,” and even more applicable for filmmakers and narrative artists wading into the new frontier of VR.
There is No Target Here. Mostly…
The Altman gestalt is not a rigid outline of causation and reaction, not a master flow of conflict, resolution, redemption, hero, anti-hero and other elements of Screenwriting 101 syllabi. Like many VR experiments, Altman films have a “choose your own adventure” quality — or at least, they offer the viewer the illusion of choice. Like today’s new VR filmmaker, Altman gave himself a task: how do you tell a story based on pure experience without falling into a genre of experimentalism that alienates, but instead welcomes you into a bigger tent?
Admitting there were some misses along the way (e.g., Popeye), the timespan of 1970 (M.A.S.H) to 1993 (Short Cuts) comprises the American’s trail-blazing heyday of what has come to be known as Altmanesque filmmaking. An incomparable master of ensemble cast, long-follow zoom lenses and inter-weaving narratives, and a groundbreaking innovator in sound recording (his sound recordists, designers and mixers were as sought-after for interviews as his cinematographers), the power of Altman films lies in the overall experience of the thing, and the director’s refusal to reduce meaning to a trackable, quantifiable set of bullet points.
Like today’s new VR filmmaker, Altman gave himself a task: how do you tell a story based on pure experience without falling into a genre of experimentalism that alienates, but instead welcomes you into a bigger tent?
His most iconic movies of this period open with the macro-view story telling device of aerial shots (medfly-spraying helicopters of Short Cuts, the medevacs carrying the wounded in M.A.S.H., the roaming security camera of a Hollywood studio lot in The Player). Unlike the carefully timed and precisely orchestrated shots of many celebrated directors (think Wes Anderson), Altman was a master of the throwaway shot; as Andie MacDowell in Short Cuts fields yet another call from a stalker while her eight-year old son dies in the hospital, instead of zooming into her face the camera slowly pulls away to blur into the brass of a bed post. To the viewer needing to track the bulls-eye of a shark, his shots are almost intended to frustrate. Don’t think too hard. Keep moving.
Reality comes to focus between the edges and tossed-off debris. Working off of heavily improvised scripts, Altman works like M.A.S.H., Nashville, and Short Cuts were able to incorporate the most up-to the minute political news and nuances of pop culture. For M.A.S.H., Altman recruited incidental players from an improv group in San Francisco.
The first normal conversation we hear from Jennifer Jason Leigh in Short Cuts comes more than midway through the movie (up to that point we’ve only heard her talk as a phone sex operator whilst changing diapers). She addresses her despondent friend (Lili Taylor). “Virtual reality. You know what virtual means? It’s like really real. So virtual reality is practically, totally real. But not.” Ever the enthusiastic skeptic, Altman filled his films in this twenty-year period with wires, cameras, pagers, recorders, car phones and whatever technology that crept into modern life.
Before Breaking the Rules, Memorize the Book
Although Robert Altman is often referred to as a “maverick,” the director spent some twenty years mastering the rules before breaking them with films like California Split, and his career-launcher (at age 44), M.A.S.H Unlike the auteur who came right out of the gate with a film that made Hollywood come calling, 1970’s M.A.S.H was Altman’s fifth film. By then, his industry war-wounds were deep, paving the way for his anti-establishment populism.
Altman’s early career was spent drifting back and forth between failed attempts at breaking into Hollywood (providing a trove of research for parodying Los Angeles life — or, according to Altman, simply portraying it) and his hometown of Kansas City, where he spent ten years directing industrials for the Calvin Company. This was his film school, where he learned all aspects of filmmaking. The work gradually allowed him to experiment with dialogue tracks.
He played by Hollywood’s rules when he got his first gig directing the teen exploitation movie The Delinquents in 1957, and continued to be a good soldier as he directed more and more television through the early 1960s (Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Peter Gunn, Bus Stop), establishing himself as a sought-after television director. But at some point he started throwing the rule-book to the side. When he tried to cast an African American actor to play the lead for an episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre in 1963, the sponsor (Kraft) refused. Altman had had enough and quit TV.
Sound and Silence: Where the Gold is.
“M.A.S.H” is the best American war comedy since sound came in.
— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
The new film school student spends just as much time learning about the power of sound as about camera work. The same should be true for the new VR filmmaker. There is good reason that films like The Player are played endlessly in film school classes; when it comes to manipulating dialogue tracks and spatial audio perception, there is just Robert Altman.
Altman: “I was just trying to give the illusion of reality. So I got fired from that.”
Altman’s first attempt at using overlapping dialogue — a technique now almost synonymous with the legacy of his work — was Countdown in 1968. Once Warner Brother head Jack Warner saw the dailies, he called the producer screaming “That lunatic is having people talk over each other!” Altman was fired and barred from the lot. In Altman’s recollection, “I was just trying to give the illusion of reality. So I got fired from that.”
Based on his short about the joys of marijuana (Pot au feu, 1966), Altman was hired to direct M.A.S.H, which would provide the director’s first opportunity to start playing with all the tools he is best known for, particularly its ensemble cast, satire and unconventional use of sound. In one classic tone-setting scene, an army surgeon (Donald Sutherland) saws through a leg: while the unmistakable metal-on-bone sound is inescapable to the viewer, Sutherland gets his nose scratched by a nurse. The main action — no matter how serious — is constantly undercut with the ironic juxtaposition of reality.
Four years later, for California Split, Altman pioneered a new sound recording technique that would change the industry. Instead of a boom mike dangled and pointed towards each actor (which necessitated exact performance, tech rehearsal and separate takes for each actor), a radio mike was placed on all main actors. The sound was then recorded on the then-revolutionary multi-track recording system. One of his noisiest films, cacophony is the rule throughout California Split, the silences and non-overlap saved for the slow downfall of the ne’er-do-well main characters (George Segal and Elliott Gould, of course).
Traditionally such a technique would be saved for the occasional fight scene (employed masterfully in its first poker party). But a fight — an activity where the feel is more important than the specifics — is exactly how Altman seems to feel about the world much of the time: that we are at odds, that the most important takeaway is the gestalt, not the details. What you happen to hear is not by the imposition the director, but what your own selective process is straining to pick out and highlight. The subjectivity of the experience is unmistakable. What the director leads you to believe is that you have agency in perception. As long as one doesn’t turn on the subtitles (“mumbles incoherently”), the viewer may just buy it.
Altman the Empath
Among documentary filmmakers, the capacity for empathy-building is the most buzzed-about attribute of VR and 360-storytelling. From the lovable hustlers played by Elliot Gould (California Split, The Long Goodbye), to the oily film executive played by Tim Robbins in The Player to the checkered ensemble casts of Short Cuts and Nashville, Altman juggled our human flaws in a mirror, urging the viewer to recognize, not despise.
In this regard there are few filmmakers who so successfully blur the genres of documentary and fiction, but many who’ve tried to follow Altman. The occasional cacophony and seeming serendipity of documentary drive films like Nashville — particularly through its more minor characters. Barbara Harris plays Winifred, a wannabe country music singer and one of the thinner threads in the film until the film’s final scene, when her sole singing opportunity is drowned out by a loud racetrack and she’s left to mime. The megaphone of outsider “Replacement Party” politician Hal Walker (think Trump) blasting away, Winifred teeters across a highway in torn hose and shaky heels, causing two cars dodging her to collide. But like all of the other twenty-four characters, she’s oblivious to anything outside her own path.
Altman saves silence for the most vulnerable, sparing them the chaos of voices fighting to drown one another out. In Nashville, Lily Tomlin — the most redeemed, centered character in the film — signs with her deaf children and cares for them over and beyond any misery felt by her marriage. The scene is arguably the most raw and empathetic scene in any of his films, the deaf children’s’ exchange its own documentary vignette. The sensory shift leaves Altman outside of his usual norm.
In Short Cuts, Jack Lemmon gives one of his last (and best) performances, as a father to Bruce Davison. After disappearing in the Valley for thirty years, he has chosen to reappear — of all times — while his eight year-old grandson dies in the hospital. As his son struggles through tight-lipped polite small-talk in the waiting room, Jack Lemmon defies all self-restraint and retells a thirty-year old story clearly painful to his son, who’s grown to be the stand-up upper-middle class father he never was. Told in suffocatingly narcissistic detail, the five-minute long story won’t stop, the camera training in slightly on Lemmon’s over-animated face, his son silent and smiling, we the viewer an uncomfortable third party nervously anticipating that this devastating monologue may make him snap. But rather than let the kettle explode, Altman lets Davison’s character offer the grace of silence.
Filmmaker Mitch McCabe is director of Youth Knows No Pain (HBO, 2009) and the upcoming Finding Normal.
