Robert Altman's Soundtracks: Film, Music, and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home Companion [Hardcover]

Robert Altman's Soundtracksoffers a compelling new look at this celebrated director's films through his innovative uses of music and sound. As author Gayle Sherwood-Magee illustrates, Altman's considerable and varied output speaks to the changing film industry over decades fromNashville(1975) toA Prairie Home Companion(2006).American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbusterM*A*S*H(1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, includingNashville(1975),Popeye(1980),Short Cuts(1993),Kansas City(1996),The Company(2003) andA Prairie Home Companion(2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals asMcCabe and Mrs. Miller(1971) have been described as, in fellow director and prot?g? Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as musicals without people singing. Robert Altman's Soundtracksconsiders Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the Indiewood boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book considers the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as lď