Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1925, Robert Altman was raised Roman Catholic and Attended Jesuit schools. After serving in the military as a bomber pilot, he studied mathematics and engineering, but left these behind to move to Hollywood to sell scripts. Finding little success, Altman returned to Kansas City for six years, where he made industrial motion pictures as well as a low-budget feature, The Delinquents (1957), produced on local funding. United Artists bought the rights to this social problem melodrama about troubled youth, and on the strength of this success, Altman was able to return to Hollywood, where he made more moving pictures including the documentary style movie, The James Dean Story (1957), and worked extensively in television, making episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Bus Stop, Kraft Mystery Theater and Kraft Suspense Theater.

In 1963 he started a film company, Lion’s Gate Films, to develop his own films and projects, but studios expressed little interest in having Altman direct. When Altman did persuade Warner Bros to let him direct Countdown in 1966, the studio found the overlapping dialogue incomprehensible, and recut the movie. After working with little recognition, Altman directed the phenomenally successful MASH (1970), which brought him notoriety and greater liberty in realizing his own projects. A long run of motion pictures in the early 1970s attracted much critical acclaim, reaching a climax with the movie Nashville (1975), Altman’s signature multi-character, multi-story portrait of a few days in the life of the South’s country musical capital.

Subsequent motion pictures were less successful, culminating in 1980, with Popeye, which failed to live up to the studio’s blockbuster expectations. Altman sold his company Lion’s Gate, and his Hollywood career languished. During this period of Hollywood rejection, Altman directed a series of moving pictures based on successful plays, as well as shooting plays for television and staging operas, often working outside Hollywood and on small budgets. Among this work, his 1988 series for HBO, Tanner ’88 (1988), is a particularly noteworthy for mixing Altman’s penchant for semi-documentary portraits of places with fictional characters. Vincent and Theo (1990), his movie based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, again earned Altman critical attention, and he was eventually hired to direct The Player (1992), a wicked satire of Hollywood, based on Michael Tolkin’s novel. The Player was highly successful, both critically and at the box-office, and Altman once again became one of Hollywood’s darling gifts as he had been twenty years earlier – despite the fact that The Player criticized Hollywood motion pictures in its form as well as its content.

The success of The Player allowed Altman to film his long-time dream project Short Cuts (1993), based on several stories and a poem by Raymond Carver. The Project became a three-hour-plus movie which used Altman’s characteristic multiple story-lines, testifying to his continued desire to rework Hollywood narrative structures. His influence in Hollywood continues to be seen in the work of his friends and former assistants such as Alan Rudolph and Michael Ritchie.

Altman’s moving pictures are distinguished by innovations of technique as well as structure. Early on he developed techniques for recording live sound with actors’ voices on separate tracks, thus expanding the aural space and complexity of movie sound, as well as capturing the haphazard rhythms of his actors performances. Whether diegetic or extradiegetic, music and voice-overs often function in Altman’s motion pictures to tie together seemingly disparate narratives and images, as do Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), the music of Nashville, and the singing of Annie Ross in Short Cuts.

The visuals of Altman’s movies are equally inventive. His use of a telephoto lens flattens the visual space of his films, giving the images a pictorial quality not unlike pointillism. His camera floats freely, the camera operator improvising new compositions as the actors explore their roles. The motion pictures that result are often a collage of ever-changing angels and drifting camera movement.

Altman has also challenged the form of traditional Hollywood genres. He has made westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and crime movies like Thieves Like Us (1974), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Player. But in each of these films, the conventions of the genre are turned inside out: in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the hero is neither a gunslinger nor a lawman but a pimp and entrepreneur; in The Player, the criminal is never caught, and the Hollywood happy ending discussed by the character becomes the ending of the movie we are watching.

Altman repeatedly examines communities through the fragmentation of the desperate and irreconcilable lives of their individuals, giving a prismatic portrait of an individualistic society. He has refused to create heroes and has consistently poked holes in the way such heroes are manufactured, whether by politics, the press, or cinema itself. Altman’s portraits of particular places thus turn back on themselves and become self-portraits of the culture industry, documentary moving pictures about themselves as fiction. Altman’s upending of Hollywood cinema form seems to be his way of staying in exile from Hollywood even while it embraces him.