Images (1972)

Schizophrenic housewife, engulfed by terrorizing apparitions, kills off each, unknowing if these demons are merely figments of her hallucinatory imagination or part of reality.

Director:

Robert Altman

Writers:

Robert Altman, Susannah York (book)

Stars:

Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi

Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 2 wins & 4 nominations.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Susannah York	...	Cathryn
Rene Auberjonois	...	Hugh
Marcel Bozzuffi	...	Rene
Hugh Millais	...	Marcel
Cathryn Harrison	...	Susannah
John Morley	...	Old Man

Storyline

Like Polanski's heroine in Repulsion, Susannah York's character is one that is seemingly haunted by memories of undisclosed magnitude. These memories are perhaps rooted in some sort of past sexual turmoil that causes York's character to see men as inherently the same.

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Plot Keywords:

mental breakdown | stabbed in the chest | husband wife relationship | shot in the chest | surrealism | 

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Taglines:

A motion picture of the extra senses.

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Genres:

Drama | Fantasy | Horror

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

UK USA

Language:

English French

Release Date:

18 December 1972 (USA)

Also Known As:

A Sombra do Duplo Amante

Filming Locations:

Ardmore Studios, Herbert Road, Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland

Box Office

Budget:

$807,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Columbia Pictures Corporation, Hemdale Film, Lion's Gate Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

101 min

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Average Shot Length = ~9.2 seconds. Median Shot Length = ~9.4 seconds.

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Connections

Featured in Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

User Reviews

Altman's lost dream sonata

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.