Page 65 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 55

Deleuzes treatment of the painter Francis Bacon, who faced a similar
historical plenitude. As Deleuze insists, it is wrong to assume that the
artist "works on a white surface." Rather, "everything he has in his head,
or around him is already on the canvass, more or less virtually, before he
13
begins his work." To resist what Deleuze calls "psychic clichés" and "fig-
urative givens," the artist must "transform" or "deform" what is "always-
already on the canvass." 14
The same is largely the case with the silver screen. John Ford's West,
for example, is the vast open prairie located in Monument Valley, where
he filmed eight of his westerns. Altman needed to find a different kind of
landscape, filled with characters other than Ford's heroic types, in order to
achieve a different, more complicated and politically perspicuous West in
his McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He called his film an " 'anti-Western because
the film turns a number of Western conventions on their sides, including
male dominance and the heroic standoff; gunplay is a solution only after
reputation, wit, and nonviolent coercion fail; and law and order do not
always prevail." 15
Altman's resistance to the clichés of the classic western is pervasive
in McCabe, beginning with the opening scene, whose deformation of the
earlier westerns becomes apparent if we can contrast it with the opening
scene in Ford's The Searchers (1956), which depicts the slow arrival from
the large open prairie of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), viewed by his
sister-in-law from the interior of her cabin. This shot, repeated at the end
of the film, with a different figure in the doorway, as Ethan's departure
is again viewed from within a domestic venue, is a moment of referential
montage that reflects the nation-building theme that lends coherence to
most of Ford's westerns. The "Anglo couple" or "family on the land" the-
matic is part of a "nationalist ideology" in Ford (as in D. W. Griffith's ear-
lier silent westerns). Although Ford eventually evinced ambivalence about
the advance of Euro-American civilization westward (in his The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance and Cheyenne Autumn), most of his films have par-
ticipated—but not without ironic qualifying moments—in the figuring of
the Euro-family as a bastion against the threat of interracial marriage and
against a competing model of familial attachment, the Indians' clan- or
lineage-based system of intimacy and attachment. 16
In The Searchers the theme of domesticity and belonging versus mi-
grancy and separation is reinforced by the sound track. As the credits
run against a playbill-style font face on an adobe brick wall, we hear the