Robert Altman Biography
Robert Altman (1925-2006) studied in different schools: at six years old he was at St. Peter Catholic School, then for a short time he studied at Catholic High School, moving on to the more artistic Rockhurst High School, but graduating from Wentworth Military Academy, in Lexington, Missouri, and majored in engineering. At the end of the war in 1945 his passion for cinema exploded and he decided to move to Hollywood, attempting a career as an actor and screenwriter. After having spent months of apprenticeship as a screenwriter in 1950, he moved on to directing documentaries, educational and advertising films and sixty-five short films on various subjects. his debut as a feature director came in 1957 with The Delinquents. Altman stands out as one of the most original, irreverent and critical directors of the cinema of the Seventies, first winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and earning an Oscar nomination for best director. His cinema, denoted by a strong bizarreness, continues with Even birds kill (1971), a symbolic denunciation of racism in the deep and old south of the States and with the western revisitation I compari (1971). The arrival of the nineties brought him to theater and television directing by signing Vincent and Theo, centered on the biography of Van Gogh, then in 1992 he directed the anti-Hollywood film The Protagonists, a satirical insight into the Hollywood environment which found favor with the box office, winning the Palme at Cannes as best director. From that moment on, Altman is officially considered the master of sarcastic cinema, of those films that are a complex interweaving of micro-stories set in a "closed place", assisted by an impressive number of great actors directed together. More than valid reasons for awarding him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 1996, an award which had also been awarded to him in 1993 for the best film, when he brought the film America today (1993) to the Venice festival. A revolutionary of the big screen, he added acidity and acrid humor to decidedly bitter overall pictures, as well as a new light of vision that met with critical acclaim. He was the only one who managed to get his nose out of the hellish circle of Hollywood and the cinema launches a moving and intense, as well as excruciating, farewell to one of its masters.
