Mark Minett | University of South Carolina (original) (raw)

Books by Mark Minett

Papers by Mark Minett

Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 18, 2021

ReFocus: The Later Films and Legacy of Robert Altman

Participating in a cycle of nostalgic Hollywood renovations of iconic pop culture characters, Rob... more Participating in a cycle of nostalgic Hollywood renovations of iconic pop culture characters, Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) brought the Hollywood Renaissance auteur into the era of the New Hollywood blockbuster. Not since his breakthrough, M*A*S*H (1970), had Altman joined a project so late in its development, with producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Jules Feiffer, composer Harry Nilsson, and star Robin Williams already attached. Together, they aspired to craft a blockbuster musical out of the characters created by E.C. Segar. Popeye, then, provides a novel opportunity to examine the interaction of Altman’s hallmark on-set transpositional strategies – his collaborative departures from and elaborations upon the pre-production script – with the iterative processes of transmedial franchising and the negotiation and integration of multiple authoring perspectives. Taking as its jumping-off point Altman’s claim that the filmmakers’ approach was primarily influenced by Segar’s comic strip,...

Refocus: The Later Films and Legacy of Robert Altman

Film History, 2014

This article reappraises the production, distribution, and reception of Emile de Antonio's Millho... more This article reappraises the production, distribution, and reception of Emile de Antonio's Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971), a satirical documentary released a year before the 1972 US presidential election, which examined Richard Milhous Nixon's political career. Millhouse provides an enlightening look into the opportunities and limitations of overtly political filmmaking as well as the degrees and kinds of political impact that political filmmakers might achieve. The article makes use of diverse sources: the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research's Emile de Antonio Papers, election analyses, and a case study of the film's use in Madison, Wisconsin.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling, 2021

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in ... more Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs a historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Alt...

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling

Chapter 1 corrects common misperceptions of Altman’s approach as antinarrative (and therefore ant... more Chapter 1 corrects common misperceptions of Altman’s approach as antinarrative (and therefore anti-Hollywood), which rely on an underdeveloped conceptualization of “narrative” conflating narrative structure, narration, and story world. Applying these distinctions makes clear that, structurally, Altman’s early 1970s films largely fit within the classical Hollywood storytelling tradition. Altman’s narrative strategies are best regarded as perversely classical, employing principles and techniques associated with classical Hollywood’s preoccupation with efficient storytelling, though not for the sake of narrative economy but to make room to expand the aims of Hollywood storytelling. Moreover, meeting Altman’s elaborative aims requires integrating rather than substituting or assimilating art cinema narrational strategies. Altman drapes on his classically structured narrative “clotheslines” an overt and reflexive narrational voice that selectively ironizes its subjects and primes audience...

Chapter 3 demonstrates that standard accounts mischaracterize Altman’s use of overlapping dialogu... more Chapter 3 demonstrates that standard accounts mischaracterize Altman’s use of overlapping dialogue, his signature sound technique, and presents a history of formal elaboration intertwined with technological innovation. Critics have underestimated the multidimensionality and capaciousness of Altman’s practice, treating pragmatically executed innovation as a counterideology. The analysis offered here demonstrates that Altman’s sound design is both highly manipulated and highly conscious of narrative aims. Altman and his collaborators innovated solutions allowing them to simultaneously convey the impression of naturalism, provide a vehicle for overt narrational commentary, and ensure the intelligibility of essential narrative premises. Tracking Altman’s early 1970s trajectory demonstrates the consistently multifaceted nature of his aims, even with the move to 24-track recording technology on Nashville. Instead of ideologically virtuous audience-liberating chaos, what we actually find i...

Accounts of Altman’s career trajectory tend to efface dynamic intra- and intermedial relationship... more Accounts of Altman’s career trajectory tend to efface dynamic intra- and intermedial relationships in favor of presuming the constraint and emergence of norm-breaking expressivity. Industrial filmmaking is paradoxically said to have groomed Altman to be an observational documentarian while also somehow training him in Hollywood’s illusionist norms. Filmed television is taken to be a forum in which Altman’s expressive agency was shackled by the producer-dominated medium’s attenuated version of Hollywood style, inadvertently fueling his later desire to reject Hollywood’s norms. Chapter 5 employs archival material and formal analysis to specify the contingencies of Altman’s industrial contexts and to demonstrate how they actually contributed to his development, steering him toward practice-oriented preferences and providing opportunities to push beyond standard approaches. The manner in which Altman’s elaborative attitude toward institutional norms extends across “Earlier Altman” to “E...

Chapter 4 jettisons the standard account of Altman’s “transpositional” script-to-screen strategy,... more Chapter 4 jettisons the standard account of Altman’s “transpositional” script-to-screen strategy, in which he is said to have casually discarded the script in favor of the anarchic possibilities of communal filmmaking. Comparing preproduction scripts with final films, this chapter clearly establishes these films’ “improvisatory ceilings,” revealing the extent to which Altman’s approach depends on retaining rather than rejecting his scripts’ scenic and narrative structures. It is around these causal chains that Altman economizes, rejecting redundancy as well as thematic and dramatic cliché. This makes room for multiple forms of elaboration—including constrained versions of the improvisatory flourishes and reimagining of character traits that underwrite his reputation, but also involving the improvisation of thematic motifs, the multiplication of “middleground” characters, and the creation of affordances for favored stylistic techniques. While Altman’s practices are remarkably consist...

Critics and scholars, preferring to treat zoom technology metaphorically or metaphysically rather... more Critics and scholars, preferring to treat zoom technology metaphorically or metaphysically rather than pragmatically, have substantially mischaracterized Altman’s approach to the zoom as either rejecting or transcending Hollywood cinema’s typical employment of mobile framing in service to narrative drama. The systematic, comprehensive, and contextualized qualitative/quantitative approach taken in chapter 2 suggests otherwise. It isolates the describable features and plausible functions of Altman’s early 1970s zooming and then applies these parameters to a statistical comparison of Altman’s films with one another and with a context set of over seventy contemporaneous films. Rather than serving an overarching interest in narrative disruption, zooms in Altman’s films were contingently employed, responding to specific problems posed by individual films. Altman’s zooms further comprehension of and strengthen engagement with dramatic action, serving not as a maverick director’s roving eye...

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 17400309 2012 746553, May 8, 2013

Danks/A Companion to Robert Altman, 2015

ReFocus: The Later Films of Robert Altman, 2021

Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, 2017

A Robert Altman Companion, 2015