Page 67 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 57

not because he is merely an individualist like some of the classic westerns
heroes, for example George Stevens's Shane (Alan Ladd) in Shane (1953). In
deforming Ford s approach to the hero, Altman is thus deforming some-
thing already deformed.
Ford s landscapes, however, remain unaltered clichés. As the Joseph
line is sung in Leonard Cohen's first ballad on the McCabe sound track,
the outskirts of the town of Presbyterian Church come into view with a
church in the center background. It is evident that Presbyterian Church
contrasts dramatically with John Ford's frontier. As the story unfolds,
what is presented is not the displacement of a wilderness with a garden, as
the wild West becomes civilized (imagery both shown and verbalized in
Ford's My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) but
rather a chaotic and violent mélange of unenviable characters. Rather than
a vast frontier, Presbyterian Church is a muddy town in a rainy mountain
venue that is far from the exemplar of an outpost for building national
community in the wide-open West. Filled as the story progresses with
hustlers, derelicts, profiteers, and predatory corporate advance men, Pres-
byterian Church's antiwestern tenor is coded not only by the difference in
landscape and character but also by cinematically evinced moods—Vilmos
Zsigmond's dark tones and washed-out, almost colorless landscapes and
Leonard Cohen's melancholy ballads.
Cohens "The Stranger Song" complements the moody, unsure, and
blustering McCabe; his "Winter Song" resonates with an emotionless,
opium-distracted, managerial Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie); and his "Sis-
ters of Mercy" song accompanies (while playing into the pervasive reli-
gious idiom) the arrival of the homely, disheveled "chippies" (in McCabe's
unbusinesslike, sexist idiom), prostitutes whom McCabe plans to employ
in his under-construction saloon-bathhouse-bordello. The somber cine-
matic mode evoked by sound, light, and color is of a piece with the "som-
18
ber mood of the new western history," which in recent decades has lent
complexity to a West that had been represented as a beckoning destiny
rather than a site of imperial expansion, involving, alternatively, negotia-
tion and violence, trading and exploitation among European, Native, and
Spanish Americans.
The color tones play an especially important role in Altman s at-
tempt to code the West. As Altman implies, the washed-out tones are
intended to give the audience a historical sense of the West: "I was trying
to give a sense of antiquity, of vagueness, and to make this not a life that