Page 69 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 59

will not save him, it's too late. Unable to make a deal with the hired gun-
man who says he doesn't make deals, McCabe flees to an assortment of
buildings that represent other (architecturally materialized) pieties—the
church, from which he is flushed out by a gun-wielding parson, and a
"house of fortune" run by a local entrepreneur.
The overturning of verbal and visual clichés does not, however, ex-
haust Altman's cinematic strategy in presenting a critical version of west-
ern history. The perspective on the facticity or the nature of what is taking
place that the film invites the viewer to adopt is assisted by characters who
bear only a tenuous relationship with the films dramatic narrative—the
catastrophe that befalls the McCabe-Miller enterprise. A young African
American, Sumner Washington, shows up in a wagon with some of Mrs.
Millers sex workers, whose wagon had broken down. He introduces his
wife to Mrs. Miller and says that he's a barber by profession. Thereafter, he
and his wife are present to the action at various moments, offering by dint
of shot-reverse shot sequences a perspective from their points of view.
To understand their role in the films aesthetic strategy, we can re-
turn to Deleuze's treatment of Francis Bacon, where Deleuze points to the
presence in some of Bacons canvases of a figure or figures that have no
narrative relationship to the central figure. Deleuze refers to these figures
as "attendants" whose role is to serve as "a constant or point of reference."
The attendant is a "spectator" but not in the ordinary sense. He or she is a
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"kind of spectator" who "seems to subsist, distinct from the figure." This
spectator plays an epistemic role, according to Deleuze, providing the basis
for determining the facticity of the scene, or, in his words, "the relation of
the Figure to its isolating place" or "what takes place." 21
Invariably, the look the viewer gets from the Washingtons' point of
view, each time the camera cuts from a group of men to the observing
couple, reveals childish, self-centered behavior associated with interaction
among crude, uncivil men. Whereas the Washingtons always appear well
dressed and dignified, the disheveled men they watch, at times cavorting
and at times brutalizing each other, are the opposite. The point of view and
contrast offered by these cuts to the Washingtons-as-attendants establishes
a mode of facticity in the West that was largely fugitive in the classic west-
erns. What the Washingtons' gaze tends to emphasize is the unreliability
of the culture "among men" to establish a mode of communal intimacy.
And what we see (as we see with them) is reinforced in numerous scenes,
as well as in Altmans characteristic multilayered sound track. From the