Gosford Park, the ‘Altmanesque’ and democracy

Abstract

This paper examines issues related to democracy, genre and authorship in the British-American film Gosford Park (2001). To what extent, it asks, do American director Robert Altman’s aesthetic strategies channel a critique of the British class system? In examining Altman’s signature use of sound, characterisation and improvisation, we ask whether the notion of the auteur is in fact compatible with democracy. We conclude that while the ‘Altmanesque’ does not ultimately lend itself to democratic ideals, especially in a highly collaborative medium such as cinema, the director’s subversion of conventional cinematic hierarchies does indeed harness the film’s reflections on class, popular culture and democracy. We show that Altman’s frequent sideways glance to the backstage, ‘non-place’ regions of the eponymous manor house to focus on the ‘non-people’ (i.e., domestic staff), parodies both the Agatha Christie whodunit as well as British costume drama, all the while lampooning within the diegesis itself his own incursion onto foreign territory. Finally, we argue that Altman’s aesthetics are designed to democratise spectatorship, by making the viewer an active producer of meaning.

Keywords

• Altmanesque
• authorship
• cinema
• costume drama
• democracy
• genre