Images (1972)

Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Susannah York
Stars: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais and Cathryn Harrison

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’m very happy that I chose to review Images to remember director Robert Altman on what would have been his hundredth birthday, but it’s a challenging movie to watch or review.

Of course, he was never an easy director to nail down. He hopped genres for fun—this is arguably a horror movie—and involved actors heavily in the writing process by having them develop their characters from his initial ideas. Susannah York has a writing credit here as she actually wrote the book that her character is writing in it, In Search of Unicorns.

If there’s such a creature as a typical Altman film, then this isn’t it. It doesn’t feature a huge ensemble cast. It doesn’t appear to contain an ounce of satire. Only one member of the cast is someone he worked with often. However, it’s a highly personal feature that’s as close to pure cinema as an American horror movie has got.

I’d tell you the story but there arguably isn’t one, beyond a basic idea that the leading lady is going insane. Altman has said, “Stories don’t interest me”, because he sees a film director’s job as to paint emotion onto the screen.

And that’s exactly what we see here. York is Cathryn, an author of children’s books, and we see her trying to write as the film begins. I’ve read a few analyses of Images to see what other critics think it means and few have mentioned the fact that the lead character is a writer.

This opening scene is a perfect example of a writer existing in the zone, only for that to be rudely burst by persistent telephone calls. Her line of thought literally tails off into nowhere as the ringing takes over. It’s an early example of competing realities, albeit not yet ones that seem dangerous. Cathryn doesn’t believe that she’s living in the world she’s writing about.

As the film runs on, however, we do wonder which world she is living in. And, as it’s all told from her increasingly unreliable perspective, I started to wonder, as she does, who’s real and who isn’t. I’m not even convinced I know how many characters there are in the story, an odd statement but one backed up by the names.

I’m pretty sure that at least two of them are real, namely Cathryn herself and her husband Hugh, who’s talked about before we meet him. A female voice on the phone, that bleeds oddly onto other calls, informs Cathryn that he’s not working late; he’s at a hotel with a woman.

However, when he does get home, at four in the morning, and they talk and kiss and, all of a sudden, he turns into someone else Cathryn recognises and the screams begin.

So they leave the city to take it easy at some sort of family holiday retreat in rural Ireland, just the two of them. She’ll work on her book. He’ll shoot the birds, both with a camera and a gun. Except, of course, it quickly gets worse.

And here’s where I’m not sure whether the other characters who show up are real or not. If we take what we’re told as true, then Hugh is her husband; the man he briefly became in Cathryn’s mind is a former French lover called Rene who’s been dead for three years; and the third man who shows up in Ireland is Marcel, a neighbour with whom she also had a fling.

However, the naming is important. Hugh is played by Rene Auberjonois, Rene is played by Marcel Bozzuffi and Marcel is played by Hugh Millais. In other words, Hugh is Rene, Rene is Marcel and Marcel is Hugh. Are these three all the same character? Certainly one bleeds into another at points, sometimes with as simple a cinematic device as having one walk behind a wall and another emerge on the other side.

It doesn’t help that Marcel shows up with a daughter, Susannah, who looks like a younger version of Cathryn. And yes, Cathryn is played by Susannah York and Susannah is played by Cathryn Harrison. It’s the same game, aided by different shots of each that mirror each other. Talking of mirrors, the background usually has at least one prop that ties into the themes of fracture and imagery: cameras, mirrors, even a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing a few pieces.

Eventually, Cathryn starts seeing herself too and that escalates to the point where they talk through a car window and the words come out of both mouths at once. I couldn’t decide if she was insane, schizophrenic, wracked with guilt, battling her base instincts, grieving her lover or reflecting on a marriage, maybe all or none.

However, Altman and York kept me glued to the screen and I’m going to be thinking about this film for a long time. Where I’m at is that it isn’t a story, it’s a glimpse into a broken mind and it’s up to us to figure out what the jigsaw might look like if it wasn’t missing pieces.

Altman’s work isn’t always this challenging, but it’s often open to interpretation and it’s as influential as it is diverse.

Often called a New Hollywood director who emerged in the early seventies, he didn’t have the usual path, never having worked for Roger Corman. After he was discharged from the U.S. Army Air Force, for whom he flew bombers in the Pacific, he wrote a screenplay on a whim that sold to RKO, made as 1948’s Bodyguard. He didn’t make it as a writer in New York, so went back home to Kansas City to write and direct a long list of Calvin Company industrial films.

His debut as a feature director was a Kansas City picture called The Delinquents in 1957 but he mostly worked on television until the very end of the sixties. The film that broke him as a talent was M*A*S*H, which landed him his first of five Oscar nominations as Best Director. He never won until an honorary award in 2005, a year before his death.

His next nomination was for 1975’s Nashville, while the others were for The Player and Short Cuts (in the nineties) and Gosford Park in 2001. That’s a few very different comedies but also a musical and a mystery.

Less awarded but arguably as influential are seventies films like the western McCabe & Mrs. Miller; the neo-noir The Long Goodbye; and the psychological drama 3 Women; and the nineties movies Vincent & Theo, Prêt-à-Porter and Kansas City. He was out of place in the eighties, Popeye and O.C. and Stiggs notable failures.

Beyond individual films, film students study his unusual narrative techniques, his deep use of music—Kansas City is a jazz improvisation—and his balancing of ensemble casts. He was a successful subversive, anti-genre filmmaker in an era crying out for them, but also an actor’s director who took his casts beyond what they thought they could do, and that’s probably the legacy he would most appreciate.