Images (1972)

Strong and Moving!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

I happened to be in Paris when this was released and saw it there in a brand new arts cinema, the likes of which I had hitherto never experienced. The film too was something of a surprise but I remember wallowing in the experience and being stunned both by the wonderful Irish landscape scenes and the vigorous and varied performance from Susannah York. It is one of those films from the late 60s/early 70s I've been a bit loathe to watch again in case they do not measure up to the image I have in mind. No worries here, some may not be happy with the reality of the 'unreal' scenes but it still looks good, York's performance is even better than I remember and if the story isn't quite as convincing as Repulsion, it is a very good watch indeed. So, if you are interested in what Altman did between McCabe & Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye, this is it. What a fine trio of films.

Altman's little-seen psychological thriller, "Images," takes on the plot of a woman working on a children's book. One night, she receives a series of mysterious phone calls from a woman who tells her that her husband is cheating on her. After the probability of this is dismissed, she retreats to a country farmhouse with her husband to work, where she is visited by a series of people from her past, as the line between reality and fantasy is continually blurred.Perhaps less thick with dream fog than "3 Women" but ten times more unnerving, "Images" is a film that truly hasn't gotten the audience it deserves. It's two parts art film and two parts psychological horror, while Altman toes the line the entire way through. Taking cues from Ingmar Bergman as well as Polanski, it's an incredibly bizarre film, especially when taken as a cohesive piece; but the real strength of it lies in the effective cinematography and the successive sequences that could almost stand as monumental short films all on their own. Slick cinematography amplifies the reality (or unreality) of the film, with characters changing bodies between shots, and Cathryn's husband walking through a swinging door only to return as her dead ex-lover. It's precisely this jarring technique that really make this work as a horror film and elicit true moments of shock and fear; we don't know what to expect from one moment to the next, just as Cathryn doesn't. It's a film of doubling, identity, and hallucination— Cathryn sits at the bottom of a waterfall writing, while the camera pans down river to Cathryn sitting on the edge of a bluff, watching herself write. Which Cathryn is the "real" Cathryn? Who is Cathryn? Is her ex- lover dead? Why have her husband's friend and his doppelgänger daughter come to visit? It's the these questions that haunt the audience throughout, and remain with you after the shocking final scene. Many have referred to "Images" as a portrait, even Altman himself, and I can think of no more accurate description. In many ways, it is a series of portraits; shards of a broken mirror that are haphazardly put back together. It's one of the most haunting and obscure films of the '70s, brimming with atmosphere, lush cinematography, and truly effective recreations of the schizophrenic mind. Susannah York's performance as Cathryn is the icing on the cake here, full of vulnerability and incognizant power. Fans of bleak psychological films will be particularly rewarded here, as well as admirers of Bergman and Altman alike. 9/10.

An audacious title for a film? But ultimately a playful rather than presumptuous outing. Well, as "playful" as a trickster god can be with one of his subjects, or as a filmmaker can be with the fragile psyche of his subject.The "images" in the film often settle on glass objects, several times focusing the frame on a camera's lens to make the symbol as transparent as can be. We are reminded that how we see things, the medium we look through, is crucial. Thus how the main character, Catherine, here views the world is shown to be unreliable.The suspense of the film mounted strongly for me in the first half, it avoids being a mere whodunnit in favor of whodonewhat, if anyone did anything. Susannah York I thought was excellent as the jittery lead, and having her cast as a children's fantasy writer was a nice touch. Somehow that made her seem more susceptible to madness and a break from reality. Her psychosis seems to have a sexual link, if that pushes your buttons.Reading in bits of her fantasy over the film might bother folks (those who hate any sort of narration), but here the fact that the narration has nothing to do with what is on screen again underscores that sort of madness. We all have been doing one thing while thinking of another, but by and large the doing part is dominant. Here the dubbed in narration makes it feel like the thinking is eclipsing the doing.The male characters all have a seventies stiffness, especially Rene Auberjonois who seemed like he was taken from a cassette on how to talk like and be a successful US businessman. Not sure if that bugged me as much as trying to place him as the younger version of the shape-shifting Constable Odo. Allegedly Altman wanted Sophia Loren once in the female role, but I think York was the better choice, as her sultriness unwraps itself more surprisingly. Sophia's genie would be hard to keep in the bottle.Overall a pleasant surprise to me, the video quality of my rental from Netflix was not as splotchy as others' copies, but the idea of this being a good rainy day watch, I'll second. The first half was an 8, the second a 6...so...7/10 Thurston Hunger

Robert Altman applies the same widescreen canvas he had previously used to capture the chaotic communities of a Korean War MASH unit and a primitive Pacific Northwest mining town to the quieter but no less chaotic internal workings of a troubled woman's psyche in this unsettling and uneven psychological thriller.Susannah York plays Cathryn, wife of a distracted husband (Rene Auberjonois), whose affairs with two men (one a family friend) and her inability to have children become obsessive memories that haunt her and drive her over the brink of insanity during a stay at a quiet country home (the country is never identified, though the movie was filmed in Ireland). She begins the film as a wounded and hunted animal, jumping at every sound and image she hears or sees. One of her past lovers appears as a ghost, the other arrives at the country home with his daughter and gropes Cathryn when her husband's back is turned. The two lovers are vaguely threatening and abusive; her husband is dismissive and treats her like a child. Cathryn realizes that she can take control and kill off her unpleasant memories -- but at the same time she loses the ability to distinguish between reality and her own feverish imaginings.On a first viewing, "Images" is absorbing and oddly fascinating, but it doesn't hold up well. For one, Cathryn isn't a compelling character, and that dooms the project from the start, since there's barely a scene in the film that doesn't revolve around her. She begins the film unhinged and really has nowhere to go from there except more unhinged. We don't learn much about her, and her illness isn't placed in any context. Susannah York delivers a shrill performance, all screeches and irrational outbursts; the male characters all come across as asses. Altman seems to be trying his hand at a feminist text, but he goes about it in the clichéd way that male artists too often address "female" issues. I think he's making some point about the way movies objectify women, turning them into "images" for the consumption of male viewers. After all, Cathryn is little more than something for the men in the film to enjoy, and cameras figure prominently in the film's mise-en-scene (Cathryn's husband is an amateur photographer). At one point, she fires one of her husband's guns (that universal symbol of male sexual power) at the ghost of her dead lover, and finds that she has instead destroyed her husband's camera. Nice try Altman, but awfully heavy handed if you ask me.I'm a champion of Robert Altman's films, and he's never failed to fascinate me with any of his experiments, but such is the nature of experimenting that some are going to succeed more than others. "Images" came on the heels of a marvelous trio of films ("MASH," "Brewster McCloud" and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller") with which Altman announced his arrival as an important figure in American cinema, and he would follow it with four more ("The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us," "California Split" and "Nashville") that would reinforce that claim, but "Images" itself is a weak link in the chain.The stars of "Images" are the mesmerizing production design and the sterling cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.Grade: B