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In our workshop this week, we were set to the task of creating our own short interview, in preparation of our workings on PB3, and one tip struck me as being particularly flawed: “Do not use zooms. Zooms are unprofessional.”

Personally, I love zooms. I will defend them until the day I die. Zoom aficionados such as Robert Altman and Brian De Palma serve as reminders that the zoom can be used for cinematic grandeur, and not simply a conveyance of unprofessionalism.

This is the best video I could find which encapsulates Altman’s love for the zoom, though do yourself a favour and watch any of his films (a handful are playing at the Cinematheque in Fed Square over the next 3 weeks, you’d be a fool to miss them).

A lot (and when I say a lot, I mean a lot) of Altman’s shots rely on his boundless use of zooms, his reputation as a filmmaker more or less defined by this unlimited, free-flowing nature of filmmaking. Altman is recognised as a ‘maverick’ in making stylised films that are also highly naturalistic; he even produced a multitrack recording technique which presented overlapping dialogue from his multiple actors, wholly emphasising this balance between style and realism. Altman films are a sensory delight; they constantly remind you that they’re films (using zooms to draw attention to the camera’s presence) while encapsulating a devoutly human side (dense and improvisational dialogue) to the production and narrative that some filmmakers tend to reject.

In his prolific use of the zoom lens, Altman achieved a looming presence following the intricacies of his (quintessentially ensemble) cast, a scene from 3 Women (1977) comes to mind as a defining shot; Shelley Duvall’s character walks though her apartment courtyard, past a congregation of other residents (again, each with their own audio track), and the camera follows her on this journey, up and until she reaches her apartment door. (Haven’t seen 3 Women for almost a year, this could be completely misguided). Additionally, he often opted to have the camera always moving, a pursuing character in itself that desires to become part of the ensemble.

British film critic David Thomson wrote about Nashville (1975) noting how “it remains enigmatic how organized or purposeful [it] is. . . . The mosaic, or mix, permits a freedom and a human idiosyncrasy that Renoir might have admired.” and that MASH (1970), an earlier Altman film, “began to develop the crucial Altman style of overlapping, blurred sound and images so slippery with zoom that there was no sense of composition”, these techniques becoming so refined by the mid-70s that they defined what made Nashville “so absorbing.”

Although irrelevant, the life of Altman seemed to be a particularly explosive one, rife with studio complications and those on the business side of the industry (supposedly once “punching an executive in the nose and knocking him into a swimming pool because he insisted he cut six minutes from a film he was working on”). One Stanley Kubrick once complimented Altman’s camerawork, following with, “How did you do it?” – A true father figure in the cinematic world.