Images to be seen in the dark

OnTheTown: Lovers of work by the American filmmaker Robert Altman gathered at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin this week for…

OnTheTown:Lovers of work by the American filmmaker Robert Altman gathered at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin this week for a special screening of the feature film, Images, which he made in Ireland in 1971.

The film's star, actor Susannah York, attended the Irish Film Archive screening, as well as the reception beforehand and the Q&A session afterwards.

"I loved working with Robert Altman, as all actors did," she said. "He loved actors. Why we all loved him was that he was a magpie. He used anything he could get from you, you never felt any kind of restraint. He was very hungry for any input you could give. We kind of created the character together. He wanted to use my children's stories [which York was writing at the time]."

York won the best actress prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for her role in Images.

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"The whole film revolves around the mental disintegration of the main character," said Kasandra O'Connell, head of the Irish Film Archive. York's performance, she said, "is so convincing and mesmerising".

Altman "was an absolute gentleman. There were never more than two takes, the second take was for luck . . . He was a genius, he really was", said Nico Vermeulen, who was assistant cameraman on Images. "It's his creativity. He allowed the actors to do their own thing. He let them play on."

Altman is "my favourite film-maker", said Prof Anthony Roche, of UCD's School of English and Drama. "He caught the atmosphere of southern California, with its drifting lives and sudden explosions of violence . . . The opportunities to see an Altman film are very rare because most of his films didn't do very well. A lot of them have a kind of hallucinatory quality. They are like dreams . . . You get absorbed in them. You have to see them in the cinema. You need to be in the dark, being hypnotised. It's the quintessential cinema experience."

Others at the special screening included Brendan McCarthy, film specialist with the Arts Council, and film production designer Paki Smith. Seamus Byrne, assistant director on Images, was there also to enjoy the screening and to chair and conduct the Q&A session afterwards.