IMDb > Images (1972) > IMDb user comments

IMDb user comments for
Images (1972) More at IMDbPro »

Filter: Hide Spoilers:
Page 1 of 4:[1] [2] [3] [4] [Next]
Index 39 comments in total 

24 out of 26 people found the following comment useful :-
Altman's lost dream sonata, 16 September 1999
Author: matthew wilder (cosmovitelli@mediaone.net) from los angeles

I have spent a grown lifetime seeking this 1972 Altman dreamscape, and lost all hope when a friend reported that the director told a Q-and-A audience that Columbia had mistakenly destroyed the negative. A specialty store in Santa Monica somehow found a video copy, and it was worth fifteen years' wait.

Suggestive of the tinkling, misted-over fugue states of QUINTET and THREE WOMEN, IMAGES riffs lyrically off Polanski's REPULSION. Where Polanski's film is pitched somewhere between sixties horror and the dry joke-telling of Bunuel, Altman's version is lush, druglike, sensuously baroque. Susannah York plays a children's writer in a remote Irish cottage who seems to be spending too much time indoors. (Were the movie not lost in obscurity, you might think her an antecedent for Jack Torrance and Barton Fink.) As she copes with the would-be-regular-guy puttering of her schmucky husband (Rene Auberjonois, in a role rightly intended for Michael Murphy), two other loathsome men flit into her life--the husband's buddy, an Irish lecher played by Hugh Millais, and a seemingly dead ex-lover, played by Marcel Bozzufi. As these men appear to bleed into one another in York's mind, so do they soon start bleeding into the cottage's Persian rugs.

IMAGES defines Altman as the freest and most fearless of all American moviemakers. Most critics only stand behind Altman's we-are-the-people movies--his community mosaics. But he clearly is as passionate about mapping inner worlds as outer ones, and these Expressionist chamber pieces are his most feckless works. The movie is also a reminder of what Altman lost when he stopped hiring Vilmos Zsigmond to shoot his movies. Almost no one on the planet has such an intuitively graceful and expressive shooting style, but Zsigmond's stunning work here--among his finest--reveals that it's a long walk downstairs from Zsigmond to the likes of Jean Lapine. And note should be made of the work of the youngish composer who wrote the elegant, sinewy, restrained score--a decidedly non-bombastic, anti-symphonic fellow whom we now know as John Williams.

Was the above comment useful to you?

16 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Brilliant, Chilling, Lost Treasure., 9 October 2003
10/10
Author: TheTwistedLiver from Chicago

Under the assumption that Altman was creatively peaking between the years 1970 and 1975, (I realize this is debatable) I sought out every film that was made during that period. Surprisingly, I could not locate the brilliant, chilling lost treasure that is the film "Images" it seemed to have simply vanished into history. Although Susannah York deservedly earned best actress at Cannes for her performance, and it was sandwiched between "The Long Goodbye" and "Mccabe and Mrs. Miller" this film, like "3 women" and "California Split", remain mysteries. Luckily, "Images" was released on DVD this past September. I immediately bought it without a second thought. I am very thankful that I did.

Images is one of those gems that make you appreciate cinema, directors and the creative process in general, because of the exploritive potential within the medium. Dredging up the inner fears and archetypes of the subconscious and weaving together what comes to the surface synergistically is Altmans vision in this film. Sadly, lately, film is about loud bangs and shiny things and very few adroitly capture the lost art of character development.

"Images" seems to be one of those films that could only have taken place in the early seventies. During the era of psychedelic drugs, the film indubitably feels as though it is on some kind of mind altering substance. It is completely trippy and unnerving. Logic seems to have flown out the window from the onset of the story. I won't give anything away, because you need to go into this film knowing nothing, or little to nothing about it, and just enjoy the ride.

Was the above comment useful to you?

11 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Another Altman Masterpiece, 6 December 2003
Author: McGonigle from bean world, massachusetts

This is one of the most compelling films I've seen in a long time. I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for a serious "psychological thriller" but this movie held my rapt attention until the very end. A brilliant example of just how talented Robert Altman is as a filmmaker. While most people pigeonhole him as "that guy who makes the movies with the large ensemble casts and lots of overlapping dialogue", this movie finds him working with a cast of six, and most of the action takes place within the heroine's head. Beautiful (of course) photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is just the icing on the cake. Don't miss this forgotten treasure by an American master.

Was the above comment useful to you?

9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
spellbinding, 3 April 2004
Author: brianh-9 from Mississippi, United States

This is an art film that experiments with dreamlike imagery. Many viewers might turn it off in frustration within twenty minutes,but I couldn't take my eyes off it. Altman's film plays with the idea of showing us the mind of Cathryn as a display to observe. We get twists upon twists and it's done in such a labyrinthine maze. We have no foundation to stand on,her mind just keeps feeding us hallucinations. I was compelled throughout the whole film taking every frame into my mind. It is one of the strangest,most fascinating portraits of the mind that I have ever seen. It just never stops delivering puzzling images and the film takes no shape depending instead on surreal happenings. This is Altman's artifice..he simply provides twists to keep us wondering what will happen next. As characters come and go,we are left wondering what will pop into her mind next.My favorite Altman film..a mesmerizing masterpiece of the disturbed mind and what can fluctuate from it. *****/*****

Was the above comment useful to you?

9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Masterful psychological tale., 11 January 2004
9/10
Author: Matt..377 from United States

Robert Altman manages to weave an exceptional psychological tale about a schizophrenic (Susannah York) and the visions (which may or may not be real) which plague and haunt her. York gives an outstanding performance. Film was precocious in 1972 and remains one of the best psychological thrillers ever. The scenery is gorgeous, and York's full nude scenes are also appealing eye candy.

***1/2 out of ****

MPAA: Rated R for some graphic violence, and for nudity.

Was the above comment useful to you?

6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Idiosyncratic masterpiece, even for Altman, 26 July 2005
10/10
Author: treadway237 from Atlanta, GA

Early one morning about two months ago, I watched IMAGES for the first time; it's still a movie memory that haunts me. The empty house I was in seemed to grow more and more cavernous as I took in this unforgettable story of a woman whose guilt and grief are driving her further into a stark inner world of madness. Yes, there are similarities to Polanski's REPULSION and even to Antonioni's BLOW-UP (in shot composition); but that is not to say it lacks a feel all its own. Altman shows his typical good judgment as a filmmaker, employing Vilmos Zsigmond as cinematographer, shooting in Panavision with rich, saturated colors oozing through each frame. He was also wise to get John Williams to compose an even-then atypically noisy score, for which the film garnered (wrongly) its only Oscar nomination. How Susannah York escaped at least a nomination as the film's star and co-writer is beyond me; her performance is one of the greatest ever committed to film. She truly seems confused, horrified, and at her wit's end. Her screams will pierce your soul. I can say more, but I will leave it at this: IMAGES is Robert Altman's neglected masterwork, a film that will scar your mind, if you have the strong countenance to endure it.

Was the above comment useful to you?

3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Composite Images, 17 March 2009
8/10
Author: tieman64 from United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Though I'm a big Altman fan, I can't think of a single powerful image or composition in his films. He's generally a weak visualist, his films often messy and shapeless.

But there's another side to Altman. Films like "3 Women" and "Images" single him out as a master surrealist, able to create spooky imagery and menacing atmosphere. Indeed, "Images" is so different from the rest of Altman's filmography, it sometimes seems like it was ghost directed by Roman Polanski or Luis Bunuel.

What is the film about? On the surface it makes little sense. Cathryn and her husband Hugh spend a few days in a spooky country house. She suffers from delusional disorder, "images of past lovers" spontaneously popping into her head. Like "3 Women" there are hints of temporal displacement, characters merging and occupying the same spaces, conversing with little girls who may or may not be their own younger selves.

Is Cathryn crazy? Are supernatural forces at work? Or is her mind consumed by guilt? Why not all three? Cathryn seems to have had an adulterous affair with a French man called Rene. He died in a plane crash but returns as an "image" to haunt her. Meanwhile, Cathryn's infidelity is personified as Marcel, a large brute of a man who constantly tries to force himself upon her. Marcel's wife, an unseen character who we know had affairs, has divorced him, but not before having a young child, a girl who is herself the splitting image of Cathryn.

Continuing with the theme of images, Cathryn's husband is a photographer whilst she is an author. The film's soundtrack often consists of Cathryn narrating one of her books, the audience forced to conjure up images to the words she reads.

So what are we to make of this? Cathryn and her husband are image-makers. Cathryn, because of her overactive imagination, imagines that her husband is having an affair. These thoughts, fuelled by her own past infidelities, attack her as "images". In order to restore her sanity, Cathryn thus murders her "image" of Rene and her "image" of Marcel. Finally cured, she drives to her husband before encountering an "image" of herself on the road. The implication is that Cathryn must now destroy her "image", destroy that paranoid part of her creating these monsters. And so Cathryn pushes her own "image" off a cliff. With this symbolic suicide, she is now free. But we eventually learn that the final "image" was not a self-image at all. It was her husband Cathryn encountered and murdered on the road. And so the film ends with a reversal of the classic Hitchcock shower scene. Cathryn faces a deadly "image" of herself. She is the monster, and all her delusions were merely fragments of her own warped persona.

Altman hints at this by naming his 5 characters after the actors who play them. They're not only "images", but "composite images". Marcel Bozzuffi plays "Rene", but "Rene" is the name of actor Rene Auberjonois who plays "Hugh", "Hugh" being the first name of Hugh Millais, the actor who plays "Marcel". Similarly, Susannah York plays "Cathryn", whilst the actress Cathryn Harrison plays a "Susannah".

8/10 – Eerily similar to "3 Women", this is essentially an art house thriller. But perhaps the most interesting thing about "Images" is a sequence toward the end which Martin Scorsese seems to have ripped off in "Taxi Driver". At the end of "Taxi Driver", Travis Bickle famously sees himself in his car's rear view mirror. Altman's female psycho does this as well, complete with that familiar little audio zing.

Was the above comment useful to you?

4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
An Awkward Attempt By Altman to Tackle the Psychological Thriller, 23 April 2007
6/10
Author: brocksilvey from United States

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

Was the above comment useful to you?

4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Creepy and spell-binding Altman classic, 20 December 2000
10/10
Author: Space Oddity_2001

Yet another film by Robert Altman that sadly languishes in obscurity, which should be a classic. It is a unique film and unlike anything Altman had done. Susannah York is excellent as Cathryn, a writer of children's novels who begins to suffer the worst form of psychosis possible. After going away with her husband Hugh (Rene Auberjonois)to her secluded country home in Ireland for the weekend, Cathyrn's hallucinations worsen. The film is a fascinating character study about her complete descent into madness as her own reality become warped with her delusional fantasy world. The cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond is dreamy and hypnotic with a score by John Williams that is haunting and atmospheric. The film makes many unexpected twists and turns that it would be unthinkable for me to give away. A lost classic that is worth seeking out.

Was the above comment useful to you?

5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
One of Altman's most satisfyingly challenging films, 24 September 2003
Author: Kenneth Anderson (efitness2@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles

I'm a big fan of 70's films and movies like Robert Altman's "Images" are a good reason why. This thoughtful and sometimes jarringly astute look into one woman's bout of schizophrenia is an actress's tour-de-force and a cornucopia of delights for the viewer. The always watchable Susannah York is the driving force behind this dream-like film that is not a narrative so much as a puzzle. From the film's opening shots, the audience is asked to participate in piecing together just what is going on with this young author who finds herself confronted with her real or imaginary past. Discovering what the images that assault her (and us) actually signify make for one of the best psychological thrillers since Polanski's "Repulsion." Unlike the films of today, "Images" forces you to watch, listen and seek the answers for yourself. A tip: 'You' and "Hugh" are sometimes interchangeable. Robert Altman is the best! Will someone PLEASE put "3 Women " out on DVD!!!!

Was the above comment useful to you?
Page 1 of 4:[1] [2] [3] [4] [Next]

Add another comment

Related Links

Plot summary Ratings Awards
External reviews Parents Guide Plot keywords
Main details Your user comments Your vote history