MITOCW | watch?v=j-F3Sy1nxPA The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: Good evening, people. I want to continue our discussion of the end of the studio era, the advent of the kind of much freer, more independent, more politically and even morally liberated movies that appear after the Hollywood dispensation has subsided. But remember that I've also been suggesting to you that even though there's a certain sense in which a kind of artistic freedom was now granted to directors and to American films, and on balance I think most scholars and film buffs looking at the 1970s would certainly share my sense that it's a very remarkable decade. But I think they might also share my sense that the films had given up more than they realized, certainly more than they were conscious of, that the shift in what we might call the media ecology of the society, which enabled this level of freedom for movies, also carried with it a tremendous cost. And remember how decisive the numbers are. I've mentioned them a few times in this course. At the height of the studio era, 2/3 of the country is going to the movies every week. It's an habitual experience for most Americans, both adults and children, really. By the time this system comes to an end, by the time the movies have been, as I've suggested several times in the course, supplanted by television as the new central storytelling system of the society, by the time that occurs at the end of the '60s, most Americans are going to the movies only once a year. And it's only particular subcultures-- teenagers, for example, who make a regular habit of going to the movies. And a good deal of the triviality and superficiality of movies of many of the box office successes of the '80s and '90s from the American film industry is a direct function of the fact that the audience had dwindled from the whole society to particular subsets of the society. And the consequences for the nature of-- the movie's sense of its connection to the society are powerful, are profound. Well, we're going to explore aspects, finally-- our final exploration of aspects of this topic comes in tonight's lecture, and especially in the exemplary early 1970s film McCabe and Mrs. Miller that we're going to screen for you after my lecture. I want to begin by talking a little bit about Robert Altman's career. And I'll actually look at certain specific films and say a few things about them in a minute. But first let me talk about what I take to be some of his-- not only the only ones, but some of his defining qualities as a director-- signature features of his work. The first and most obvious to me is what we might call his moral skepticism. He really is in some respects temperamentally an outsider. And it's interesting to speculate, I think, about what might have happened to Robert Altman, an immensely gifted natural filmmaker, had he been born a generation earlier and had to actually struggle with the requirements and responsibilities, the confinements of the studio system. But luckily for Altman, he emerges in the time when the tyranny of the studios and also the creative input of the studios has disappeared, has gone away. And in that sense, he represents a new kind of independent spirit in filmmaking. And he resembles some of the other directors who come of age at roughly the same time, directors some of whom I mentioned this afternoon, like Scorsese or Coppola or Alan Pakula. So one of his defining qualities is a kind of moral skepticism, a kind of sympathy, we might call it, which is connected to what we might call his sympathy for the marginal. Over and over again in Altman's films, we focus on either marginal figures who are reluctantly or inadequately part of a larger community, or we focus on a community that itself is so dubious as a community, so damaged as a community, so enfeebled and unlike the traditional communities that it's as if the community he treats itself, the societies or groupings that he finds interesting, are also in some deep way non-traditional communities. And in fact, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, most of the supporting cast were literally members of a commune. They were members of the counterculture. The ballad that is sung by the great balladeer, American singer Leonard Cohen in the beginning of the film, would have struck knowledgeable viewers as a deeply subversive gesture. Because think how often the Western begins with a ballad, with someone saying a ballad, as if the stories of the West have become so mythological that they're part of our song tradition, our musical tradition-- which is true-- as well as our narrative tradition. And many, many classic Westerns begin with a ballad of some kind. The Searchers has such a ballad, in fact, as I hope you noticed. Well, McCabe and Mrs. Miller begins with a ballad, as you'll see. But it's a subversive ballad. It's sung by a man, Leonard Cohen, who's deeply associated with marijuana, with the counterculture, with striking out against authority, with writing anti-war songs. And there's a kind of countercultural ambience, a kind of countercultural skepticism and sympathy for the margins in nearly all of Robert Altman's work. So his moral skepticism then could be said to have at least two dimensions. One is what we might call an aesthetic dimension, in which he is skeptical about the inherited strategies, belief systems, and even structures of earlier movies. And he actually is in that sense aesthetically subversive, although very subtly so, as I hope you'll see in tonight's film. He'll very often give you a film that seems on the surface to sustain and to recreate all the classic conventions of the genre in which he's working. And it's only when you look a little bit more closely that you realize that although the structural elements are there, they have been perverted or inverted so that they have in some sense enacted some kind of moral migration and stand for virtually alternative beliefs, assumptions, or values from what they normally are taken to stand for in the classic genre films on which Altman is borrowing, or against which he is engaged in a kind of mockery or at least hostile action of some kind. And I think that McCabe and Mrs. Miller demonstrates this very dramatically, although most of Altman's films have these qualities in some degree. The second quality of his moral skepticism is what would be not now related to his aesthetic principles, to his filmmaking practice, but would be more broadly associated with politics, with his general ideological view of the world. And even there, especially there maybe, Altman styled himself a rebel. Even when he was successful in Hollywood in his early career when he was so-- MASH was a box office success. And the decade of 1970 through '80 is probably the richest decade of Altman's career. And in that time, even though Altman was very successful, later he fell into disfavor with the Hollywood bosses and he spent some period of his career underground in a way, either not making movies at all-- directing plays in various places or making documentary films or private films that were not released commercially. Then he has a resurgence later, before the end of his life. The last 10 or 15 years of his life again involve successes at the box office. So the second aspect of his moral skepticism might be a kind of political skepticism, and a political skepticism both against the Hollywood system and then against the larger political structures of the society. Now remember, his political subversiveness comes at a time when many honorable and normal people, including your professor, were subversive in some sense, because it was a time when the country was at war in a war that many people in the country thought was unreasonable and wrong. Many people went to jail or protested the war. And Altman was on the side of the anti-war forces. He was on the morally skeptical side about wars of choice in foreign environments. So he was both politically and culturally a skeptic and aesthetically a skeptic. And both qualities show up in his films in all kinds of remarkable ways. I've talked about how that leads to a kind of sympathy for marginality, for the condition of marginality and for characters who belong on the margins of the society, who live on the margins. And he loved to make films often about certain kinds of human communities, subsets, small versions of human society comprised entirely of misfits and marginal characters. And he even has a sympathy for what we might think of as unconventional appearance, so that many of the actors and especially the secondary background actors in his films might actually be in ads for grotesquerie. He loves the grotesque. And at least his background characters often have a sort of grotesque element. There's a love of the weird and the strange in Altman that you can feel in his films, in his casting and in his subject matter.