Images

Splitting Head Fakes

Images
UK/USA 1972
Directed by Robert Altman
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a week between me first seeing Images and writing this review and I’m still, I’m happy to say, thinking about it.

I’ve always found Robert Altman a bit hit and miss as a director but I’ve been wanting to see a decent print of his film Images since I first became aware of it in early 1980. It was in that year that the BBC showed their wonderful documentary (which I don’t think has ever been repeated or made available commercially) called Star Wars - Music By John Williams.

Now although this documentary was using the hook of the Star Wars films and the upcoming ‘second episode’, The Empire Strikes Back (some of which you see Williams conducting as he records against the images), as a hook for audiences, this is much more a long film about John Williams and his music and not, as you might first think, just his Star Wars scores. It’s an excellent documentary and one of the film clips they showed in this piece, along with films like Jaws, The Guide For The Married Man, Jayne Eyre and The Towering Inferno, was a brilliant sequence from Altman’s Images.

Now, that first vague impression of the film and the score stuck with me for many years until, a couple of decades later (at least), a CD replicating the original vinyl soundtrack release of Williams score was made available for a short time. It only took me one play to realise that, although the atonalism on display here was somehow a little sweet and syrupy compared to some other composers working in that style, it was easily the great composer’s best work. And now, finally, after a wait of 38 years* since seeing that clip, I have finally seen the movie. And it’s easily one of Altman’s best creations.

The film is about... well that’s kind of hard to pair down. Susannah York plays a character who is somewhat fragmented in her mind. After a series of unsettling but minor incidents she gets her husband to take her back to her childhood home (in a location unspecified, although the film itself was shot in the beautiful landscape of Ireland) where she continues to have more ‘episodes of a disturbing nature’ building to a point where she finds herself guilty of something she has had no knowledge of knowing about (and probably the audience doesn’t either, until it’s revealed at the end).

From the outset, the director uses lots of different visual ploys to start slowly disorienting the audience as to the trustworthiness of both the sound and images York is seeing and hearing. Asides from William’s quite striking and deliberately nerve jangling score, the director will do things like using zooms (yeah, he’s not afraid to use zooms like a lot of directors and DPs seem to be today) cut against static shots and then highlighting various objects which hang down from something... such as wind chimes, chandelier fittings, glass beads etc. Meanwhile, Susannah York starts quoting from a children’s book, In Search Of Unicorns, which the actress was writing at the time and which Altman found out about and incorporated into the script. I could find little significance on first watch with either Altman’s visual fetishes or with the narrative sections, other than as fragments of unrelated and persistent things which he could rub together to continue to keep the audience on their toes.

For me this all came to a head the first time her husband, played by a young Rene Auberjonois, returns to the room seemingly played by another actor, Marcel Bozzuffi. This scares the life out of her and happens more than once in the narrative and the transformation is less than clear when it’s ‘explained’ that he is, in fact, the visual and audio echo of York’s dead, ex lover. In fact, at various points, actors appear in the place of others and you are never 100% sure if the crossovers, which I assumed were inspired by the works of Bunuel but which Altman credits to Bergman, are split into two or more identities or are themselves a visual echo of a single identity at any one time. The difference between the two seems to change at various points of the film and it doesn’t make matters any easier when the actors are on screen in two different personae at the same time.

When York is driven out to her ‘other’ home, we watch her sleeping in the car from different perspectives (including shots of her reflecting in the rear view mirror) while we still hear her narrating the book she is reading (although a lot of the film is dialogue free). This sequence is wonderful enough but then Altman tops it by having her waking up because the car has stopped. She walks up a hill to find her husband who has got out because he wants to hunt some quail and tells her to drive on to the house without him before pursuing said birds. She looks down from the hill at the house which is her destination only to see the car she is standing in front of arriving at the house in the distance. She watches as she sees herself getting out of the car and then we finish off the sequence from the other version of her exiting the vehicle and looking up to see a distant figure watching her... the figure we know to be herself. We carry on with the ‘arrived’ version of her but we still sometimes catch glances of the previous version on the hill, watching her as she looks out the window. This is great stuff and I love the way that a director could have cleverly handled this as a visual transition to York’s arrival but Altman seems to indicate, “No, it’s not just a scene transition. Now you figure out what’s going on.”

The director continues to throw the audience off guard and this includes the use of some beautiful shot set ups where he uses verticals and natural splits in the interior of the house to separate people and environments. So you can see an accidental fire started in one room while watching an oblivious York working in the kitchen in the room beyond in the other two thirds of the screen. Or he’ll have York and her husband doing a jigsaw which is obviously a metaphor for the fragmentary nature of the main protagonist’s mind (the last piece of which contains an image you might well figure out before the end of the movie) but they are shot from afar, looking through some stair bannisters which are in the foreground. He also makes use of mirrors to double and triple up the actors and actresses throughout, to further wrong-foot the audience. 

Things get harder for York’s clearly suffering character as she comes face to face with fragments of her past when out walking in a forest, such as a long dead dog she used to own and, at more than one point, the other version of herself who we started off the film with.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this one for me is that Altman’s signature of using overlapping dialogue on screen is present but, when he uses it in this movie which is itself visually confusing, he does it not to obfuscate the clarity of that narrative but to make sense of a particular scene, as York’s inner narrative is pitched against another person’s recollections. So Altman manages, by the point at which he employs this technique, to maintain the confusion of just what it is the audience is seeing while he is actually using this trademark element to clarify a specific situation. So deliberately going against what could be, even at this point in his career, a reasonable expectation of the way in which he shoots and presents a film.

Another thing he does, though, and this is definitely helped by Johnny Williams’ truly gorgeous score, is use the language of the horror film to tell his tale... perhaps suggesting that the visual ghosts that York is seeing are just that, although I think it’s pretty clear that they aren’t and this is not, in fact, a horror film. I could see the temptation for certain kinds of audience members to grasp onto that as a way of making sense of the narrative issues, however, which are deliberately kept anything but neat and tidy.

Ultimately, Images loses traction after a while and I thought it got a bit flat in the final third. However, it maybe because I found the earlier scenes in the movie so overwhelmingly brilliant that I was expecting all sort of shenanigans to lead on from it. I think it’s fair to say, though, that on the whole I really enjoyed this movie and can see myself revisiting it a few more times in my lifetime, if able to find the time. Definitely it’s a film for lovers of the art of the cinema and a very strong recommendation from me. Easily one of Altman’s best movies, without question.

*At time of writing the first draft of this review sometime early last year.