ROBERT ALTMAN: IMAGE CONSCIOUS. Last night Robert Altman sat in the back of a Film Forum theater and watched his movie Images (1972) for the first time in about 20 years. The print was beautiful, the film fascinating. After the audience gave the director a standing ovation, he came forward and offered very brief remarks.

"I could cut twenty minutes out of it," Altman said of Images in "answer" to a question about how the names of the cast members were apparently reshuffled as the names of the film's characters. Then the director suddenly waxed affectionate and nostalgic.

"I was really infatuated with what I was doing," he recalled, almost apologetically.

Finally, Altman seemed to make a full retraction. "I wouldn't cut any of it," he said in defense of his movie.

So I guess we won't see a shorter Images: The Director's Cut any time soon—even though such an alternative strikes me as potentially worthwhile. I feel that way not just because of my interest in Altman and Images, but because, to the best of my knowledge, few if any Director's Cuts turn out to be shorter than the theatrically-released versions. (Just try to imagine an Apocalypse Now Redux Redux that lasts a mere 90 minutes.)

Images can accurately be said to belong to the genre of "psychological" or "hallucinatory" movies that, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, has a lineage that goes at least as far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). It can be said to be a cousin (to varying degrees) of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976) as well as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Altman's own Three Women (1977).

The film effectively conveys the anguish of its main character, Cathryn (Susannah York), who lashes out violently in a struggle to distinguish between reality and hallucinations. What makes her plight especially disturbing to me was her solitude, her efforts to combat her problems privately instead of doing whatever she could to get outside help. Those closest to her don't seem especially helpful, either, adding to her isolation and desperation. If her story is any indication of what some people with mental illnesses must endure, my sympathy for them has grown as a result of seeing this movie.

Images is very much a product of the great burst of cinematic expression that followed the establishment of the ratings code in the United States. The nudity, violence, and obscenity heighten the intensity of its investigation of long-avoided "real-life" issues of language, imagination, identity, and sexuality. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is stunning, and the eclectic score by John Williams (Altman called him "Johnny") should surprise anyone who, like myself, associates him mainly with the orchestral bombast he contributes to Steven Spielberg movies.