Nine short stories into a long one: narrative strategies in Robert Altman's "Short cuts" (1993)

• Autores: María del Mar Azcona Montoliú
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 75-85
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper intends to explore Robert Altman's adaptation of some of Raymond Carver's short stories in his film Short Cuts. The film, based on nine short stories and a poem by Carver, does not consist of nine self-contained little movies. Instead, this three-hour-long film deals with the lives of twenty-two Los Angeles residents who are arranged in nine groups of characters and whose different storylines intersect in certain moments of the film. As I will try to show, the film, which disappointed some of Carver's fans because they felt that that mish-mash of tales was not what Carver's fiction was about, manages to master principles of narrative structure not only to achieve spatial, thematic and formal unity but also to preserve some of the elements of Carver's fiction while at the same time creating a completely different effect on the spectator.