the twentieth century started to throw up forms, moving pictures, and popular music, which seemed to have more in connection with the working man than with them’ (Fellowes 172). . 19Gosford Park’s playful dialogue with heritage cinema seems designed to raise questions about what constitutes ‘quality’ in British cultural production. James Dalrymple, « Gosford Park, the ‘Altmanesque’ and democracy », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 57 | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2019, consulté le 27 septembre 2020. Nevertheless, given the limitations of the role, Jackman delivers one of his finest performances. "ア メリカ・インディペンデント映画の父"と呼ばれたロバート・アルトマン監督の実像に迫ったドキュメンタリー。カンヌ、ベルリン、ヴェネチア映画祭すべてで最高賞を受賞したのは70年代以降アルトマンただ一人。映画好きは必見！ Yet despite his formal experiments, Altman’s films were not intended for the arthouse ghetto and most enjoyed widespread theatre releases in the US and abroad. As the director explained, ‘I’m trying to let the audience discover the picture rather than throw it at them. Fellowes, Julian, ‘Afterword,’ Gosford Park—The Shooting Script, New York, Newmarket Press, 2002, 164–175. As we will see, most of the music in the film is intradiegetic and is employed in the service of discourse on class relations. We should recognise how the way the film was named and marketed was a deliberate appeal to fans of costume drama and the whodunit. Reitman is more in his element with “The Front Runner,” especially in the film’s first half, as we dive into what politics was like in 1988. The film clearly evokes the Agatha Christie murder mystery, or whodunit, which typically depicts ‘a group of people assembled at an isolated place—usually an English country house—who discover that one of their number has been murdered’. The upstairs characters are disdainfully business-like with the inspector, cold-shouldering and interrupting him. the texts refuse to tell spectators where they should be looking and force them to increase their spectatorial activity’ (del Mar Azcona 145). . . The Front Runner will start hitting theaters on November 7, 2018. Moreover, of those residents at Gosford, the vast majority are ‘non-people’ ultimately confined to utilitarian areas. This is the contradiction and tension at the heart of Altman’s work, between a signature aesthetics and a collaborative approach, between the stamp of the auteur and the looseness of improvisation and spontaneity. 2020 All Rights Reserved. Armstrong, Rick, ‘Introduction: “Diving Off the Deep End”’, Robert Altman: Critical Essays, ed. Playfully evoking the Agatha Christie whodunit and British costume drama, the film gives prominence to the domestic staff, whose perspective it purportedly shares. Of course, for those viewers not already alerted to this through the film’s publicity, this explicitly sets up our anticipation for the murder to come. It also becomes quickly apparent that the bumbling inspector possesses no gifts for detection at all, and treats his police colleagues with the same lack of courtesy as the upstairs characters show him. This assertion is supported by Julian Fellowes, who explained that ‘the writing had to be extremely economical’ due to ‘Robert Altman’s belief that an audience has to pay attention and not be spoon-fed all the information. James Daley, New York: Dover Publications, 2007, 91–107. 6The multi-protagonist work Gosford Park, perhaps Altman’s last great film, also displays another facet of Altman’s style: that of genre revisionism. 1Often working with large casts of actors—many of whom featuring on screen simultaneously, with dialogues frequently overlapping one another—US director Robert Altman (1925–2006) came to be associated with a signature style despite working in a range of genres. Not only are the culprits in Gosford Park mere ‘servants’, but so is the film’s de facto detective Mary. In Gosford Park, there are several clear allusions to genre. Despite the fact that his ‘celebrity, his classlessness, and his urbanity appeal to those below stairs,’ Countess Constance upstairs ‘makes it abundantly clear that he does not belong’ (MacKinnon 56).