Images (1972)
Cast: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi
Director: Robert Altman
Country: USA| UK
Genre: Drama | Fantasy | Horror
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s Company Man: The Best of Robert Altman. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
Slow brooding camera movements ponder spaces overflowing with the paranoid preoccupations of a woman tortured by her work, psychological fragility, or secret conspiracies aimed at tormenting her psyche. Buried amidst these expensive accouterments of leather and wood, she formulates a story as the gentle patter of rain tickles at the windows, perhaps raining only within the context of the story she is writing but for Cathryn this demarcation is hazy at best. She works at collecting the poetic fragments of her shattered reality to condense them into a story, but the incessant ringing of the phone tears her from the menacing literary sanctuary in her mind while Robert Altman crafts a psychological thriller that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, having tormentors with the same name as the actor they torment on screen call from what may well be our own universe in subtle touches of genius and madness.
Slow brooding camera movements ponder spaces overflowing with the paranoid preoccupations of a woman tortured by her work, psychological fragility, or secret conspiracies aimed at tormenting her psyche.
Cathryn’s pale skin, blond hair, and white clothes render her a shade in her blank palatial surroundings. Her soft and strained speaking voice forces the viewer to nervously hang onto every word except when she is lost in her internal thoughts that boom with confidence that she only possesses in the romanticized, fabricated world that is less menacing and disruptive than her tortured reality. Crossed phone lines or a decreasingly firm grasp on reality bring more mysterious tormentors, punishing her for some unknown sin committed either in the real or literary world, deepening her sense of isolation and the horrors of her irrational fears.
Altman crafts this paranoid thriller by shaping light like a master sculptor working with ethereal clay. Soft light dances through hanging crystals, gently out of focus in the supple techniques of 1970s filmmaking. The light of the setting sun spills over a hillside creating unassuming visual magic with enchanting star-bursts and lens flares, covering the countryside in a blanket of warm shapeless light. Beams penetrate slats that cover windows and cut the room with razor sharp menace, obscuring characters in alternating light and shadows, slashing through the room like an axe murderer bent on some secret psychotic agenda. Cathryn engages in acts of infidelity as ornate crystal decanters loom in the foreground, exploding with soft focus light as faces blend together and lovemaking takes on both dream and nightmare qualities as entangled lovers’ bodies are covered in the obfuscating light of raindrops sliding down the bedroom window.
Altman crafts this paranoid thriller by shaping light like a master sculptor working with ethereal clay.
Images is stylistic and intangible as Robert Altman creates a Polanski-esque world of paranoia and fragmented reality. It blurs the lines between fiction and reality with contextual and meta-contextual elements that heighten the mystery, creating a puzzle that may or may not have all the pieces, but as one character asserts all of the pieces “should be there”. But when crafting a film using light, paranoia, and psychological horror as the sculptor’s medium, does it really matter if they aren’t? 84
Images is stylistic and intangible as Robert Altman creates a Polanski-esque world of paranoia and fragmented reality. It blurs the lines between fiction and reality with contextual and meta-contextual elements that heighten the mystery.
