Institutional Elaboration

Accounts of Altman’s career trajectory tend to efface dynamic intra- and intermedial relationships in favor of presuming the constraint and emergence of norm-breaking expressivity. Industrial filmmaking is paradoxically said to have groomed Altman to be an observational documentarian while also somehow training him in Hollywood’s illusionist norms. Filmed television is taken to be a forum in which Altman’s expressive agency was shackled by the producer-dominated medium’s attenuated version of Hollywood style, inadvertently fueling his later desire to reject Hollywood’s norms. Chapter 5 employs archival material and formal analysis to specify the contingencies of Altman’s industrial contexts and to demonstrate how they actually contributed to his development, steering him toward practice-oriented preferences and providing opportunities to push beyond standard approaches. The manner in which Altman’s elaborative attitude toward institutional norms extends across “Earlier Altman” to “Early Altman” challenges hierarchizing assumptions about the nature and direction of cross-media influence.

Elaborate Chaos

Chapter 3 demonstrates that standard accounts mischaracterize Altman’s use of overlapping dialogue, his signature sound technique, and presents a history of formal elaboration intertwined with technological innovation. Critics have underestimated the multidimensionality and capaciousness of Altman’s practice, treating pragmatically executed innovation as a counterideology. The analysis offered here demonstrates that Altman’s sound design is both highly manipulated and highly conscious of narrative aims. Altman and his collaborators innovated solutions allowing them to simultaneously convey the impression of naturalism, provide a vehicle for overt narrational commentary, and ensure the intelligibility of essential narrative premises. Tracking Altman’s early 1970s trajectory demonstrates the consistently multifaceted nature of his aims, even with the move to 24-track recording technology on Nashville. Instead of ideologically virtuous audience-liberating chaos, what we actually find is functionally virtuosic orchestration that represents not a rejection of Hollywood but its vitalization.

Quantifying the Subliminal

Critics and scholars, preferring to treat zoom technology metaphorically or metaphysically rather than pragmatically, have substantially mischaracterized Altman’s approach to the zoom as either rejecting or transcending Hollywood cinema’s typical employment of mobile framing in service to narrative drama. The systematic, comprehensive, and contextualized qualitative/quantitative approach taken in chapter 2 suggests otherwise. It isolates the describable features and plausible functions of Altman’s early 1970s zooming and then applies these parameters to a statistical comparison of Altman’s films with one another and with a context set of over seventy contemporaneous films. Rather than serving an overarching interest in narrative disruption, zooms in Altman’s films were contingently employed, responding to specific problems posed by individual films. Altman’s zooms further comprehension of and strengthen engagement with dramatic action, serving not as a maverick director’s roving eye, penetrating existential assumptions, but as a storytelling tool that also allowed for elaborative, and frequently aestheticizing, flourishes.

Improvisation, Transposition, and Elaboration

Chapter 4 jettisons the standard account of Altman’s “transpositional” script-to-screen strategy, in which he is said to have casually discarded the script in favor of the anarchic possibilities of communal filmmaking. Comparing preproduction scripts with final films, this chapter clearly establishes these films’ “improvisatory ceilings,” revealing the extent to which Altman’s approach depends on retaining rather than rejecting his scripts’ scenic and narrative structures. It is around these causal chains that Altman economizes, rejecting redundancy as well as thematic and dramatic cliché. This makes room for multiple forms of elaboration—including constrained versions of the improvisatory flourishes and reimagining of character traits that underwrite his reputation, but also involving the improvisation of thematic motifs, the multiplication of “middleground” characters, and the creation of affordances for favored stylistic techniques. While Altman’s practices are remarkably consistent throughout the early 1970s, later scripts display interesting innovations anticipating and accommodating Altman’s practice-oriented preferences.

Perverse Clotheslines

Chapter 1 corrects common misperceptions of Altman’s approach as antinarrative (and therefore anti-Hollywood), which rely on an underdeveloped conceptualization of “narrative” conflating narrative structure, narration, and story world. Applying these distinctions makes clear that, structurally, Altman’s early 1970s films largely fit within the classical Hollywood storytelling tradition. Altman’s narrative strategies are best regarded as perversely classical, employing principles and techniques associated with classical Hollywood’s preoccupation with efficient storytelling, though not for the sake of narrative economy but to make room to expand the aims of Hollywood storytelling. Moreover, meeting Altman’s elaborative aims requires integrating rather than substituting or assimilating art cinema narrational strategies. Altman drapes on his classically structured narrative “clotheslines” an overt and reflexive narrational voice that selectively ironizes its subjects and primes audiences for interpretation. This grounded approach enables a “closure without comprehension” strategy resolving causal structures while leaving affective and thematic implications ambiguous.

Conclusion

Calling into question authorship criticism’s tendency to treat undersupported claims about formal design as starting points for the deployment of an interpretive hermeneutics aimed at revealing political and expressive significance, the conclusion instead considers how a historically precise rethinking of Altman’s innovations broadens the field of questions we might ask about the possibilities of Hollywood authorship. In its recognition of elaborative authorship as a position within Hollywood filmmaking practice, the account presented here suggests a reconsideration of the nature of Hollywood norms. The conclusion argues that Altman’s novelty is best understood not as rejection or assimilation but in the context of a Hollywood cinema whose norms have always been a work in progress on multiple levels. It is not only Hollywood’s conventions and techniques that are constantly in play, contingently open to a range of modifications and renegotiations, but also its underlying principles and aims.

Introduction

The introduction identifies the tension in Altman scholarship between oppositional and assimilationist positions, explaining how they share an understanding of “Hollywood” as a relatively staid and uniform tradition until the late-1960s box office downturn uniquely afforded newcomers opportunities to reject or simply update establishment style in order to appeal to a hip, film-educated youth audience. This facilitates accounts of filmmakers’ transcendent visionary powers, supposed to generate uniquely expressive breaks with norms. In contrast, Altman is reconsidered here through a historical poetics approach understanding filmmakers as problem-solving agents pursuing inferable goals within the constraints and affordances of specifiable historical contexts. From this perspective, Hollywood is not a transhistorical style but a storytelling paradigm open to constant reinvention. Focusing on a moment and filmmaker typically thought to embody a break from the establishment clarifies the complex historical texture of Hollywood filmmaking as a vital cite of contestation, innovation, and elaboration.