Robert Altman was an American director born in Kansas City, Missouri, celebrated for a loose, overlapping ensemble style that became one of the most influential in American cinema. M*A*S*H, a darkly comic Korean War satire, established his signature use of naturalistic overlapping dialogue and satirical tone, while Nashville wove more than twenty characters through the country music industry to create a sprawling portrait of American ambition and delusion. The Long Goodbye and The Player showed his gift for subverting genre convention, the former dismantling classic film noir and the latter delivering a caustic satire of Hollywood itself, while Gosford Park, made late in his career, transposed his ensemble technique to an English country house murder mystery. Altman's distinctive use of overlapping sound design and roaming, observational camera work made him one of the most widely imitated stylists of the New Hollywood era. Read more