Page 73 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Robert Altman 63

tation—which leads ultimately to his election to the United States Sen-
ate—on the mistaken assumption that he bested Valance in a gunfight.
Thus, what seemed like a simple, heroic nation-building narrative, a man
from the East bringing law and order to a violent West and subsequently
incorporating his region into the nation as a state, turns out to be a com-
mentary on the role of myth in the nation-building process.
When the narrative returns to the present, the films most famous
line is uttered by the newsman, who having learned that Stoddard is not
the man who shot Liberty Valance, and having been asked if he will print
this revelation, says, "This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend." At a minimum, Ford displays an ambivalence to-
ward myth inasmuch as his main character, Ransom Stoddard, displays
a "chronic inability to give authority to his assertions until be becomes
.
the man who shot Liberty Valance . . until he becomes the person he's
28
not." Ultimately, the reverence for words and books, for which Stoddard
is supposedly an avatar, is undermined by the moral ambiguities afflicting
his identity.
In Buffalo Bill Altman takes up Ford s concern with the mythic West,
not to debunk myths but, in his words, to have "another look at them,"
to move "to a place where I can look at them from a different angle." 29
The "look" that Altman provides is distinctive, for his Buffalo Bill Is shot
almost entirely with a telephoto lens. While the historical trope in Ford's
Liberty Valance is largely a function of the black-and-white tone, Altmans
is a function of the historical tableaux produced through telephoto zoom-
ing effects. Although there are some panoramas in the film, Altman uses
the telephoto lens "even [in] those big wide shots, in order to compress
images [because] . . . long lenses change the image and evoke antiquity." 30
Thus while he uses color tones to connote antiquity in McCabe, it is the
telephoto lens that achieves the time image in Buffalo Bill. But the "time"
at the center of Buffalo Bill is not ethnohistorical time—not the events
involved in the whites-vs.-Indians encounters in the West—but media his-
torical time. This temporality is signaled early in the film; as the credits
are run, the sound track plays a tinny version of the music associated with
cavalry charges in classic westerns, and when later, Sitting Bull enters the
combat ring during the show, the sound track replays a Hollywood ver-
sion of Indian drum music.
Who is looking and listening, and what are they /we hearing and
seeing in Buffalo BÜß The time image achieved by Altmans telephoto lens