It truly does feel as if a friend has died. I remember seeing The Player in high school and being filled with delight, and then shortly after that Nashville, which confused me more than anything I’d ever seen before. I didn’t know what I was looking at or what it was supposed to mean. Without putting it into words, deep inside I knew that I would need to learn a new kind of film language. And even after years of obsessively studying the work of David Lynch, I was completely stunned the first time I saw 3 Women. Again, a filmmaker I thought I knew, throwing me for a loop. And causing both excitement (that I’d finally seen it) and anger (that it had been so hard to find, so marginalized).

Altman has made so many films and so many different kinds of films that he’s the rare director (like Bunuel and Hitchcock) whose work you can endlessly revisit; each time you rewatch an Altman film, not only does it seem different, but compared to another Altman film it seems like the work of a different PERSON.

I’m still hoping that Nightmare in Chicago (which I’ve never seen) will end up on video sometime soon. In the meantime, we all have a lot of reseeing to attend to.