Robert Altman Has Died

Last night in my Film Form and Film Sense class, we watched the utterly beautiful and evocative, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

So it is with a heavy bit of tragic and poetic irony that I just read that director Robert Altman has died.

One of the most beloved, respected and distinctive directors in the business, Altman was known for employing huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue and often shot scenes in long tracking shots that would bounce from character to character.

Altman was the man behind such wonderful films as M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Gosford Park.

His final film, A Prairie Home Companion, was a musing on death. At the time, I wrote about the film, "One can't help wondering if the 82-year-old Altman, who received an extremely well-deserved Honorary Oscar at last year's Academy Awards and admitted to a shocking heart transplant some years ago, sees the film's undercurrent of impending death in his own life. Then again, so long as the angel of death looks like Virginia Madsen, it must not keep him up too much of the night."

You're in good hands, Robert.