MASH

Robert Altman - 1970
This is a really great film; a complete joy from start to finish, fascinating too.
Altman has a roving camera. In pananvision, we start from usually very long, occassionally very close, and nearly always zoom out or in as depending. He uses pretty long takes as standard, though can edit a bit. I suppose his compositions are complex, full of action, full of characters, but I wouldn't at all describe it as fast or furious. R Yes it's busy, but no one is really conveying significant narrative information, so there's no need to look across his various characters at a breakneck speed.
He does a good bit of panning, pretty extensive at times but usually (except when he spins the camera for the football, and a few bits and bobs) steady, smooth. He likes a swoop too, usually down on the tents. The setting he creates as very confined, we really have no look at Korea; it's kind of a muddy car park of tents, which is a great way to avoid worries of exotism; precisely the right atmosphere.
The narrative is loose, the few moves in it that come are made extra clear, which is necessary as the film isn't interested in conveying information to us. The scenes aren't generally all that long.
And now let's talk about the sound, which is just stunning. We have special sound effects; the Japanese gong, and various others, that are not conspicuous enough to be slapstick; just inventive, pushing what can be done (and adding to the debate on genre r.e. this film). The dialgoue is key here. What I especially loved about it was the way it is delivered; very low key (except the characters we don't like, Burns and Hot Lips early on). It's just relaxed, I almost want to say naturalistic. It is damn likable.
And of course the notorious overlapping. This means we sometimes can't hear who says what, or we have to work out where a voice comes from. Unlike Godard, this doesn't really hide information we need to construct a narrative; largely because there isn't a strong narrative to be given from the dialogue, and partly because the information that is given by the dialogue is given not so much from its content (which we might not be able to exactly make out), but by its tone (i.e. Hot Lip's shrieking). The tone of speaking is more important than what is said.
There are all kinds of smart and inventive uses. The loudspeaker (the secret recording really foregrounds how we think about sound), a bit of miming, and other things. This is such an aural pleasire as a film, this hubbub of relaxed, saying some funny stuff, slipping in with friends in this terrible environment.
We can also note how dialogue is used in tandem with the edit. As sound bleads from one locale to another in a non-continuity edit it can start to act as a voiceover, a foregrounding of narration. This crosscutting of image, but not of sound, is one example of how the film is really not classical realism. As well as talking of movies on the speaker, foregrounding narration through sound, and those sensational, joyful, audacious end credits (moving from within the film, keeping the track to turn smoothly into the credits), there are certain images that Greenaway maybe knows. The funeral, shown as a painting of the last supper with the dark red lights (Altman uses the dark quite a lot), and the use of smoke machines.
The political connotations of this film don't have to be read explictly; but the film only is what it is because of them. I'd be uncomfortable reading a 'message' straight off. I'd rather say that the film, for me, felt anti-authoritarian. We are on the side of the unit just hanging out. We are against Burns, mocking the religious. The unit have fun, mess around on that relaxed way, but do, really, do the job. They're so discontented with this horror around them; they've obviously got to act like this, or they'd go mad, like Burns. I'm not entirely sure how Altman makes us like them so much; maybe because they're relaxed. They just seem like people who like life, caught in a situation that occassionally, in rare shots of a patient, we see in horror (and wounds are pretty much never directly mocked). They're also the anti-racists.
I think sexism is a question here. I was initially rather put off by the unit's pretty sadistic treatment of Hot Lips, and general attitude to woman; and we're meant to like these guys. But this is alluded to, and it seems to me we have to see it as a fualt of the men; this isn't direct identification we have here.
I wouldn't really add this film to my 'just hangin' out' category, though it shares a lot of traits; not so narrative, low-key, fun to be around, a physically pleasurable film. The film doesn't use identification like that, if we're hangin' out with anyone, it's with ALtman, his visual and crucially aural atmosphere. This is of people we like, because we like people, in a shitty world that peeks through, getting by.