Images

Year: 1971
Director: Robert Altman

The psychological horror film, Images, is one of Robert Altman’s lesser-known films. It was released in 1971, between more familiar and popular films from the director; his revisionist Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and his revisionist and ironic treatment of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

Images is not typical Altman. In many respects it is a more conventional and commodified film to the style of film-making closely associated with him: multi-layered stories, characters cross-talking, a withering and languid “anti-establishment” gaze that suggests everyone involved, including the viewer, is gingerly working their way through a stalled recovery from a bad 60’s trip.

Images is a tight chamber piece, filmed mostly with interiors and with a limited cast. The plot, such as it is, is simple and functional. So far so normal. The conventionality and simplicity of plot and setting are important because what Altman wants to do is to warp our perceptions of normality. What we witness in Images is how different another person’s normality can become over the course of the film. That person is Cathryn, portrayed by Susannah York. She is a children’s author, married without children and living what appears at first to be a comfortable lifestyle. But Cathryn is a woman who is in the grip of some kind of terror and we, as witnesses to that terror, must decide what is real and unreal because poor Cathryn is too unstable to be trusted with the task of telling us that herself. The images we see on screen are predominantly interiors of Cathryn’s off-kilter mind.

Altman symbolises Cathryn’s fragile and fractured mental state using cameras and mirrors as props in various scenes. We gain a sense through the perspective of these objects that we are watching Cathryn’s internal horror being played out before us. We are unsure whether the people we see her interact with are really there. They are somewhere but, like images on film or in our mind’s eye, they may not be real in Cathryn’s exterior world, only in her internal world. Like reflections in a mirror our perception may change if we change our position in front of the mirror or if Cathryn’s mood changes. Like looking through a camera lens our perception of the world can change even as we look at the same scene before us with the naked eye. The limited use of external shots is all the more affecting as it extends the idea that the horror of Cathryn’s mind is inescapable by any physical means.

York is superb. Her role is demanding. It is difficult to have empathy for a character who is inconsistent, who cannot be trusted, whose interior monologues are often violent and disturbing. Within all the madness that drives the film’s narrative, York manages to find something very human in Cathryn. This is best exemplified by the story her character is writing, In Search of Unicorns. In the moments that Cathryn’s imagination is focused on her book writing she is in her most content and stable place . The book is her escape from the horror of her own self, a reality that she can control even if it is fantasy. Altman plays with our sense of the “realness of reality” by breaking the 4th Wall. In Search of Unicorns is a book that York really did write and have published; the first names of each character in the film is the real first name of one of the other actor’s. Confusion and doubt are manipulated by Altman to try and destabilise our own perceptions of what the film is really portraying to us.

Images is an impressionistic art-house film but it is the type of art-house film that used to signify a growing sea-change in conventional ideas of film-making, that used to be able to both challenge and entertain in equal measure, pushing the boundaries of what cinema can do in the name of art and entertainment. Images is informed by the seismic rupture to film-making that was Ingmar Bergman’s 1996 classic, Persona. Altman would return to such influences again with 3 Women. It also sits comfortably in that sequence of classic claustrophobic psychological horror films such as Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – which preceded it – and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) – which came after. Even more recent fare like Amenabar’s The Others (2001) distils some of the methodology of Images in presenting horror as the outcome of the untethered mind of a woman. It is interesting how women are often the preferred gender for the demanding roles of these films but that’s another topic altogether.

Finally the one other successful break from film convention is the superb soundtrack. It’s by John Williams but is a million miles from the John Williams that scored multiple Oscar winning and award-baiting Spielberg films. Like the film the soundtrack is also impressionistic and avant-garde and works as a brilliant extension to Altman’s use of visual symbolism. It is violent and frightening in equal measure, in large part due to the extraordinary and often outrageous contribution from the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta, a man whose unsettling but affecting music would later be used by Roeg on the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell To Earth. His percussion is the sound of Cathryn’s mind fracturing into more and more jagged pieces.

Images is not classic cinema; it is too small and introspective to reach that marker. It is too experimental and difficult, from a conventional perspective, to engage a mass audience. The plot to Images has a simple resolution but the plot is not the main feature of the film, it is the way Altman tackles the subject matter of madness and portrays it on screen that fascinates and engages the viewer. The cinematic illusion Altman strives for only works if you are prepared to see images of the world through Cathryn’s eyes, regardless of how confusing, unsettling and untrustworthy that might be to us.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Repulsion, Don’t Look Now, The Others. Psychological horror that work on multiple levels of interpretation and exposition.

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