@deanduncan63Saw #McCabeandMrsMiller. This, & director R. Altman’s oeuvre entire, is putting me in mind of Richard Wagner & Sergei Eisenstein …
… Here is the former’s gesamtkunstwerk, or integrated art work, here is the latter’s neutralization of film elements. What, you say? …
… Well, normally in Mozart, Verdi, commercial Hollywood, etc., the melody (crystal-clear plot, emphatic dialogue …
… easily graspable characters) is clearly, emphatically front and centre. Everything else serves to support, & does so discreetly …
… Not so, these provocative other guys. W’ RA, it starts w’ the vaunted, stacked soundtracks. Visual design is similarly expansive, multi-planed …
… Erstwhile main characters keep falling back into the collective, into mass compositions, an opium haze, or the obliterating landscape …
… Message or meaning? Well yes, but pick one & it multiplies, doubles back, gets problematized, even dissolved. So much harder. So much richer!
#McCabeandMrsMiller also evokes Theodore Adorno/Hanns Eisler’s Composing for Films (OUP, 1947). TA/HE advocated …
… and also modeled (cf. this celebrated score: http://bit.ly/1x4BmlF) the use of modern compositional techniques in film music …
… So, no to simple parallelism, dumb musical typage, servile musical subordination. Rather, dissonance! Difficulty! …
… Much more true to the dreary world, & our tenuous place therein. Depressing, if you want. Invigorating, if you will!
#McCabeandMrsMiller. One of the greatest of winter films. Can’t imagine the difficulties that went in. Can barely measure …
… the evocative that comes out. Actually compares, & quite positively, w’ Pieter Bruegel’s hunters, 1565.
#McCabeandMrsMiller. Mind you, folks. This is an adult movie!
#McCabeandMrsMiller. Altman owns this, but it’s also very much in line w’ Warren Beatty’s thematics. Compare, say, to Shampoo …
… or Bulworth. The Establishment is poisonous. The Counterculture, which claims ethically superior alternatives …
… is even worse. Stupid inequity on the one hand, gross indulgence & hypocrisy on the other. The result? Death, & the world a wasteland.
#McCabeandMrsMiller. Beatty takes punishment as well as Brando. Beatty dies (’67, ’74, ’78, ’81, ’91) as well as or better than anyone.