The art of sound design: how Robert Altman hijacks your ears
Robert Altman is one of the most rebellious directors of the New Hollywood movement, with a colourful and naturalistic style that often criticised American politics and culture through sprawling ensemble casts, rich narratives and revealing satire. Perhaps what remains so distinctive about Altman’s style is the dream-like and slightly dystopian edge to each story world, with each film remaining rooted in reality but with a hint of unrest and corruption that distorts the overall tone, leaving you unsettled without being able to articulate exactly why.
From the eccentric characters in Nashville, meta-commentary in The Player and the nihilistic undertone in The Long Goodbye, each of Altman’s films often captures the chaos of everyday life through his particular fly-on-the-wall perspective, with meandering plot lines that are seemingly aimless but extremely biting in their portrayal of our messy reality.
The director achieves this effect through long takes, frequent use of the zoom lens and wide takes, creating a tapestry-like feeling to each shot that encourages the audience to delve deeper into each frame to pick apart each detail, becoming a detective as you look beneath the bigger picture to find the hidden thread that connects each story. At first, a film like Nashville can feel overwhelming and slightly disjointed, but after looking beneath the sprawl of each image, you slowly begin to see a portrait that is most reflective of life itself.
However, while all of these techniques are associated with his style, the director pioneered another trick that added to his expansive yet incisive impression of everyday dystopia, using multitrack recordings of overlapping dialogue to record multiple interweaving conversations that add to the overall cinematic puzzle.
In films like Nashville and Shortcuts, Altman revolutionised cinema through his frequent use of overlapping dialogue that could capture simultaneous conversations between multiple different characters. Because of this, in any given scene, the audience isn’t entirely sure what they should be listening to or who the main character is, adding to the naturalistic tapestry style of his films as the mundanity of life unfolds before our eyes.
Sometimes, a sentence will begin and slowly fade out completely, while other lines of dialogue that are seemingly unimportant will linger on screen and force us to join the perspective of a secondary character. Through this technique, Altman creates an imitation of life at its most authentic, unbothered by convention, as he articulates the inner world of every character, with each person on and off screen being equally important and not important in what they are saying, much like the real world.
Through his genius approach to sound, Altman created a maze of interactions and dynamics for the audience to delve into. Each viewing of his work reveals something new as it explores the collective psyche of America through the documentation of individual voices. For the director, there was no such thing as a right or wrong sentence, creating an improvisational feeling as every thought and word becomes blurred in one large melting pot, much like the collective voice of the country he both loved and despised.
