Page 64 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

54 MichaelJ. Shapiro

valences and meanings that the rhythms of life have in alternative social
venues. For example, in a seemingly trivial yet exemplary moment of filmic
and aural montage in Nashville, the scene cuts from a hospital, where
an elderly husband weeps over the news that his wife has just died, to a
youthful, festive gathering in a music club in which someone is laughing
in precisely the same rhythm as the husband's sobbing. And in Kansas City
Altman produces a similar parallel resonance in a scene in which jazz-club
owner Seldom Seen's henchmen are knifing to death the cab driver (who
had conspired in the robbery of Seen s black gambling customer) in an
alley. As the cab driver is being killed, there is a cut from the alley to Seen's
Hey Hey club, where "at the same time the two saxophonists try to outdo
each other with a rapid exchange of short phrases. [Coleman] Hawkins
and [Lester] Young engage in a cutting contest of their own," 11 and their
intensity produces the same rhythm as the killing.
The politico-aesthetic sensibility that Altman enacts in Nashville and
Kansas City is in evidence in his two exemplary westerns, McCabe and
Mrs. Miller (1971) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians: Or Sitting Bulls His-
tory Lesson (1976). In what follows, I treat the way Altman structures his
films to dislodge the imagistic and narrative clichés with which the West
has been produced in classic westerns. In these two westerns Altman exer-
cises his exemplary politics, a subversion of (in his words) "set ideas, fixed
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theses, platitudes, things that say this is this." In the process he offers a
cinematic politics of history that rethinks and restages America's western
experience.

Resisting the Cliché: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

What has been the dominant figuration and story of the American
West? From the three aesthetic genres of legendary history, painting, and
fiction—of Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister
respectively—to the classic western films of John Ford, the West, as it
was narrated and figured throughout much of the twentieth century, has
been primarily a heroic story about Euro-American cultural and politi-
cal expansion on a large panoramic frontier, under a big sky. The movie
screen to which Altman brought his work was thus not blank; it was
already filled symbolically with figures, spaces, and narratives. The con-
ceptual implications of the already-saturated historical West with which
Altman was faced when he decided to do a western is addressed in Gilles