Robert Altman

The crowd is the protagonist. Altman ran several conversations at once and let the microphone choose, so his films arrive as overheard rather than told — and every genre he touched came back deflated, the western muddy and the detective indifferent.

Signature

• Overlapping dialogue, recorded on separate tracks and mixed like weather.
• Ensembles too large for a lead, cut so the story is whoever is talking.
• Genre revisionism: the myth kept, the heroism removed.
• Zooms that drift across a scene looking for the subject.