Page 63 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 53

kind of "freewheeling jazz improvisation," 4 an approach reminiscent of the
aesthetic strategy of Ralph Ellisons novel Invisible Man, which constructs
African American history in the form of "a jazz composition or perfor-
5
mance." According to Altman:
A song is usually about three minutes long . . . but when jazz guys work on it, the
song takes IJ minutes. I decided to make a song out of the story of the two women.
As it developed, the whole movie is jazz. Harry Belafonte [who plays jazz club owner
Seldom Seen] is like a brass instrument—when it's his turn to solo, he does long
monologues like riffs—and the discussions of the two women are like reed instru-
ments, maybe saxophones, having duets. 6

Altmans film is therefore political not because it deals with a presi-
dential election but because of the way it works on (in Rancière s terms)
"the contraction or distention of temporalities, on their contemporaneous-
ness or their distance, on [their] way of situating events at a . . . minute
7
level." And Altmans cinematic aesthetic accords well with other genres
belonging to what Rancière refers to as the contemporary "aesthetic re-
gime of art," which is a departure from the traditional mimetic regime by
dint of its reversal of the privileging of "the primacy of the narrative over
the descriptive." The aesthetic regime features instead "a fragmented or
proximate mode of focalization, which imposes raw presence to the detri-
ment of the rational sequences of the story." 8
But with what kind of presence is Altman concerned? If we heed
the ideas immanent in his cinematic form, that "presence" emerges as a
^presence, a bringing to presence—conceptually, cinematically—of par-
allel streams of life. Making use of parallel montage, a technique pioneered
by D. W. Griffith, a "yoking together of non contiguous spaces through
parallel editing," Altman effects a "disfiguration of continuous time" to
allow a glimpse of the copresence of different lifeworlds. 9 For example, in
Nashville, in which he explores a complex racial/spatial order by creat-
ing a panorama with multiple personalities involved in different kinds of
stories (in an American city that is both a place and a musical institution),
Altman resists what his editor, Sid Levin, calls "the classic style. . . the
conventional use of master, medium and close-up shots." Rather, there are
"three or four different master angles of the same sequence, each with a
slight variation in camera angle." 10
In addition to decentering the sociopolitical order with shots taken
from many angles, Altmans cuts and juxtapositions reveal the different