This year's Oscar recipients include American maverick Robert Altman; he is to receive an honorary award 'for a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike'. Tony McKibbin examines the career of this unusual director, who has pursued an idiosyncratic approach to pace, composition, and character.

In an interview in Projections 1, the annual forum for critics and filmmakers, Robert Altman explains that when he showed the Short Cuts (1993) script to his colleagues, everybody had a problem with Lori Singer's character, the cello player. 'This doesn't make any sense. Why did she commit suicide?' Altman would reply, 'Well, I don't think we know why anybody commits suicide, so I don't want to explain why in the film'. This respect for the contingent as opposed to the cause and effectual aspect of reality is echoed in another answer in the same interview, where he says 'everything you do today informs what you do tomorrow'. What he is looking for is taking the 'linear references out of film, and have something that works on the individuals in the audience so that the information they get from the film suddenly invades all the information they have accumulated in their lifetime'. We could say that most other art forms allow for this process to a far greater degree: One can look at a painting for however long; a piece of music can carry us off to wherever we wish to go; a book can be put down on the lap for a moment of contemplation. Theatre has some of the narrative expectancy of cinema, and demands, even more than film, the good manners of paying attention, but, unless a farce, usually works through language which is there to be absorbed. Pace has never been absolutely central to its ontology.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.