Page 71 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 61

again, Altmans camera work carries the burden of mapping the encounter
of the characters. In particular, the face shots of McCabe—subsequent-
ly repeated in other scenes, in which Mrs. Miller displays an unladylike
manner—convey what McCabe's agency is about in the film: a puzzle-
ment stemming from an inability to evade stereotypical thinking. Face
shots, or what Deleuze calls the "affection images," locate the intentional-
ity of the self. The face is where the meaning of all the bodily movements,
as an ensemble of the agency of the self, is registered. It is responsive to
the questions "What are you thinking about?" and "How do you feel?" 23
In contrast, except for the dreamy moments when Mrs. Miller is high on
opium, the face shots of her demeanor register the determination of some-
one in control of her surroundings.
^Ultimately, however, a structural dynamic overpowers whatever ef-
fects issue from the force of their personalities that constitute the McCabe-
Mrs. Miller enterprise. Here it is apropos to refer to what Noël Burch has
famously called two kinds of filmic space, that within the frame and that
24
outside of it. Two visits, one by the mining company's advance men and
one by their hit men, take place within the frame. In confrontation with
the advance men, who try to buy him out, we witness a cocksure McCabe
who rejects their offer. When the hit men arrive, riding in like all strangers
in westerns, we witness a different McCabe, a fearful ingratiating version
whose attempts at mollifying these new representatives go for naught. But
the two sets of visitors, whose interactions with McCabe reveal McCabe-
the-antiheros instability, are connected to a powerful force outside the
frame, the force of capital.
Altmans attention to the way that corporate capital displaces the
efforts of the small entrepreneur impugns the clichés that attend settle-
ment in the classic westerns and, most significant, challenges various nar-
ratives of "the winning of the West," especially those based on notions of
civilizational superiority. At a minimum the heroic cowboys are displaced
by bumbling maladroits, who appear as mere children compared to the
women, whose civic skills create the only communal stability. But even
the more perspicuous narratives that emerge from Ford s films—that the
law book has displaced the gun (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and
that "words won the West" {Cheyenne Autumn)—are overturned by the
lesson in political economy offered by McCabe, All that was missing from
McCabe by way of an important political pedagogy was the fate of the
"Indian." But Altman turned to this pedagogy explicitly five years later