Page 62 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

4

Robert Altman

The West as Countermemory

MICHAELJ. SHAPIRO

Altman's Politics of Aesthetics

If film is the "aesthetic matrix of a particular historical experience,"
it remains for us to ponder the ways in which it articulates the aesthetic
with the political so that the "historical experience" is rendered politically. 1
Although there is a wide variety of relevant approaches to the political impli-
cations of artistic texts addressed to particular historical periods, Jacques
Rancières remarks about the politics-aesthetics relationship best capture
the way that Robert Altmans films supply a political sensibility. Rancière
notes that insofar as an artistic text can "borrow from the zones of indis-
tinction between art and life the connections that provoke political intel-
.
ligibility . . it does this by setting specific forms of heterogeneity, by bor-
rowing elements from different spheres of experience and forms of montage
from different arts or techniques." 2 Thus, for example, in his Kansas City
(1996), a film that features a crossroad between diasporic African American
musicians and several levels of Euro-American political officials, Altman
juxtaposes (in parallel montage) the macropolitics of the 1938 presidential
election with the micropolitics of African American economic survival as
it is functioning within a diasporic jazz culture. But rather than allowing a
conventional political narrative to dominate his story, he frames the inter-
actions and intersections of the two political cultures as a song. As Altman
puts it (in response to complaints that the plot of Kansas City is thin), the
"story" in the film as a whole "is just a little song, and it's the way it s played
3
that's important." Altmans approach was to make the movie itself into a

52