Stranger Songs: 8 Films By Robert Altman & Paul Thomas Anderson

‘Everything of Robert (Altman)’s films has been an inspiration to me,’ director Paul Thomas Anderson said in an interview around the release of There Will Be Blood (2007), the film he dedicated to his then recently deceased idol.

This year marks the centenary of Robert Altman’s birth. Though older than most of his peers, he was a key figure in the New Hollywood movement – the wave of filmmakers who, in the late 1960s, upended the traditional studio system with raw, realistic, and innovative movies. Among this group – including names like Coppola, Scorsese and Friedkin – Altman stands out as perhaps the most idiosyncratic of them all. His breakthrough was the iconic anti-war satire M*A*S*H, and followed by a string of early 1970s masterpieces, including the unconventional western McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the musical epic Nashville, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. With a sharp eye for satire and genre, Altman repeatedly used his films to dismantle the myth of the American Dream, exposing it as a game with no winners.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson – whose new film One Battle After Another is released on 25 September – has cited Altman as his greatest influence. He devoured his films from a young age, with Nashville and The Long Goodbye making a particularly lasting impression. The influence is unmistakable: from the Altmanesque overlapping dialogue in Phantom Thread to the ensemble storytelling of Magnolia and Boogie Nights, reminiscent of Short Cuts and Nashville. And there is, of course, the shared preoccupation with the dark side of the American Dream: the nihilistic greed of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood is difficult to separate from the opportunism of gambler John McCabe in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

This dual retrospective highlights key works from the careers of both directors.