On the career of Robert Altman and what his method produced.

Altman is the American director whose formal innovations have been least successfully imitated. His films — MAS*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Short Cuts — use overlapping dialogue, ensemble casts, and a zoom lens that creates a quality of surveillance rather than composition.

The overlapping dialogue was Altman's most radical formal choice. In conventional filmmaking, one person speaks and others are silent. In Altman's films, everyone is always talking, and the audience must constantly choose where to direct attention. This creates a specific kind of viewing experience: you cannot be passive. You must be active participants in the film's construction.

Nashville is the film where this method is most completely realized: twenty-four characters across five days in Nashville, their stories intersecting without fully connecting, their lives touching and separating. The film is not about its characters individually. It's about the country music industry as a cultural system, and the system is more visible through the density of the ensemble than any individual story could produce.

Altman's relationship to genre is similar to the Coens': he uses genre frames and then systematically removes the consolations the genres promise. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a Western with no hero. The Long Goodbye is a detective film with a detective who can't detect. The genre is there; the genre's satisfactions are not.