Director Robert Altman is probably best known for movies like Nashville and MASH, movies with large casts, complex and overlapping dialogue and a very slice-of-life feel. Which makes something like Quintet, a highly obscure film from 1979, a deeply strange artifact indeed. Altman never made anything like it before or since which is, as I’m about to explicate, a very good thing.

Altman made experimental films during his career, but he never made anything as experimental as Quintet, a starring vehicle for Paul Newman that has essentially no plot, extremely threadbare dialogue and off-kilter characterizations. It’s also probably the most unpleasant-to-watch film Altman ever made, because in addition to flattening out all the scenes so that they were as sterile and (literally) cold as possible, he further chose to rim the camera lens with a circle of Vaseline to give the impression that everything is being watched through a frosty window. It’s a bizarre affectation that actually begins to hurt the eyes after a while, because although the center of the image is in focus and completely clear, Altman continued to compose around the edges, which were blurry and made everything indistinct and blob-like.

What is Quintet about? Well, it’s about an Earth that has undergone some kind of cataclysm and is now a frozen wasteland. No explanation is given for why this would be the case, though we can probably infer that this is a nuclear winter of some kind. Not that any evidence for this is ever presented, but you’ll find yourself trying to invest the (in)action on the screen with some kind of meaning or purpose. Your explanation may be different than mine. So be it.

Anyway, Paul Newman plays Essex, a man who has lived in “the South” for a decade or more hunting seals. But as the film begins he and his girlfriend/wife/companion are headed north to an unnamed city where Essex once lived. The seals, you see, are all gone and apparently pretty much all other life with it. The city is a last-ditch effort for survival, because if people can manage life there, perhaps there’s hope for Essex and his woman.

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Considering the man has had such a dramatic impact on the film industry, it’s kind of surprising that more filmmakers haven’t tried to emulate Steven Spielberg. Sure, they follow in his footsteps with summer blockbusters and thrill-a-minute action spectaculars, but even those don’t have the essential feeling that says Spielberg. I’d argue that it’s become more difficult to pin him down creatively in the last 20 years, as he’s veered off into primarily dramatic/prestige territory with movies like Lincoln, but some of his early works are so instantly recognizable as his that I don’t know why he hasn’t had a legion of imitators over all these decades.

When I do think of faux-Spielberg, probably the first thing that comes to mind is Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Produced by Spielberg, that movie does such a terrific job of pinning down Spielberg’s particulars as a lover of suburbia and the modern family, all the way down to the visual fillips, that some have claimed Hooper didn’t shoot the movie himself, but was actually supplanted in the director’s chair by Spielberg. I believe we’ve finally stamped out that rumor in large part, but periodically I’ll see someone raise the speculation again and we start all over.

It’s really a disservice to Hooper, thinking that of Poltergeist. Spielberg’s style was so iconic, even in 1982, that probably any skilled filmmaker could have latched onto the features of his work and replicated them. And certainly the task has become no more difficult as time has allowed Spielberg’s movies to be relentlessly dissected by students of film. Which brings us to Super 8.

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