Grit and Whimsy: Altman’s Unfiltered Cinema

Dalia Morgan reflects on Robert Altman’s distinctive approach to filmmaking, where authenticity reigned supreme, as seen in Three Women and Popeye. Altman’s trust in his actors’ creativity brought a rawness to his films that feels scarce in today’s CGI-dominated cinema, a legacy Shelley Duvall embodied in every nuanced role. I was watching Popeye the other ... Grit and Whimsy: Altman’s Unfiltered Cinema

Dalia Morgan reflects on Robert Altman’s distinctive approach to filmmaking, where authenticity reigned supreme, as seen in Three Women and Popeye. Altman’s trust in his actors’ creativity brought a rawness to his films that feels scarce in today’s CGI-dominated cinema, a legacy Shelley Duvall embodied in every nuanced role.

I was watching Popeye the other day, after news that Shelley Duvall had passed, and was reminded of a perhaps so-called weak point of Robert Altman’s: too much authenticity and grit.

A problem which we cannot find today, as we have the opposite issue now. Altman had presented the whimsical world of Popeye in an ultra-realistic way which, at the expense of occasionally being very boring, seemed to both mock and be full of a certain kind of gritty whim. So much so that he is know to have encouraged actors themselves to write their own parts.

In Three Women, Altman encouraged Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule to inhabit their characters fully, letting them improvise and write much of their own dialogue.

Trusting his actors’ instincts yielded interesting results, transforming Three Women into a haunting meditation on identity, relationships, and the fluid nature of reality. The trust that must have been necessary to embark on productions whose under-netting was held together by the real selves of its team is astounding, and scarce today.

“Authenticity is, for its many proponents, ultimately a felt, sensual, even embodied historicity: it’s the ‘authenticity feeling,'” writes Mattias Frey, a film and media industries scholar at the University of London. “Such remains a prevalent issue in contemporary cinema,” echos Calum Russell, journalist and film editor.

Production companies “believe the spectacle of fantasy lies in grand CGI vistas rather than the careful development of a compelling world, layered by the authenticity of dirty fingernails and muddy trousers.”

Muddy trousers is what Altman had in spades and what we need to come back.