ALTMAN ONCE SAID THAT THE ONLY THEMATIC CONTINUITY IN HIS FILMS WAS A PREOCCUPATION WITH ‘THE FLEXIBLE BOUNDARY BETWEEN SANITY AND INSANITY.’ IMAGES FOCUSES ON FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY, BUT IS ESSENTIALLY A FAIRYTALE THAT TELLS US MUCH MORE ABOUT ALTMAN’S IMAGINATION THAN ABOUT THE FEMALE PSYCHE.
Images was shot in Ireland in 1971 and won Susannah York the best actress prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. York plays the disturbed, guilt-ridden Catherine, who experiences nightmarish hallucinations featuring three men: her distracted husband, a dead lover who reappears to torment her, and a lecherous neighbour. Although we know that the heroine is grappling with mental phantoms, Altman ensures that these are quite as substantial and menacing as the everyday reality to which they are related. The results make for a complex, deliberately ambiguous puzzle of a movie which Altman himself compared to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.—Peter Walsh.

LEAD ACTRESS SUSANNAH YORK AND SEAMUS BYRNE WILL LEAD A Q&A AFTER THIS SCREENING.