The real world of Robert Altman

Some fine-tuning may be necessary. In point of fact, Altman, who died last Monday at 81, was a paradox: a thoroughgoing film industry professional and a Rabelaisian nonconformist, a workhorse and a stoner. His films are the most faithful visual record of the 1960s counterculture available, not because he took the hippie era as his subject -- he didn't -- but because its loosey-goosey, mischievous, democratic values are part of his work's very nervous system.

"M*A*S*H " came out of nowhere in 1970, and Altman was famously one of the last directors to be approached to make it. Yet the anti war war film struck a nerve with moviegoers and the larger culture because it seemed so effortlessly in tune with the times. This was less because of its topic -- set during the Korean War, "M*A*S*H" commented with bloody sardonicism on Vietnam -- than a style of filmmaking that itself felt like a fresh, current voice.

Using roving multiple cameras, searching zoom lenses, and microphones on everyone up to and including the extras, "M*A*S*H " did away with the Hollywood focus on stars. The film said this is how real people behave -- this is how the real world looks and sounds. In the movies that followed, a genre that soon came to be called "Altmanesque," the director uncorked a vision of life that can stand with Jean Renoir's (even when the movies don't) in its barbed humanism and a belief that everyone has his or her reasons.

"Nashville," "Brewster McCloud," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Buffalo Bill and the Indians," "A Wedding," "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," "The Player," "Short Cuts," "Gosford Park," "The Company," "A Prairie Home Companion" -- these movies are parties with comedy and tragedy happening in every corner, and Altman presided over them like a benevolent, pot-smoking paterfamilias. Actors loved working with him because the wine flowed freely, in the artistic sense as well as the literal; the filmmaking was the congenial work done between the on-set banquets. Altman may have been the Tuscany of American moviemakers.

Which is not to say that his movies couldn't be deadly serious: the ending of "Nashville" encapsulates everything that was out of whack in this country in the early 1970s, and "Short Cuts" is a work of breathless pessimism. When Altman chose to work on a smaller scale, as in the underrated 1972 psychological puzzle "Images," or in the heartbreaking "Thieves Like Us" (1974), or the scarifying Nixon one-man show "Secret Honor" (1984), he could dig deep into character. The mysterious "3 Women," from 1977, is the closest he came to being our own Bergman; "A Wedding" (1978), "HealtH" (1980), and "Prêt-à-Porter" (1994) his problematic bids to become our Fellini.

What people forget, though, is how steeped Altman had to be in the business before he could deviate from it. From 1957 through the mid-'60s, he was an efficient director of TV episodes, working on more than 20 different series. "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Bonanza," "Combat!," "The Millionaire," "Kraft Mystery Theatre," and many more benefited from the services of this solid go-to journeyman. Does his TV resume show evidence of his future directorial style? Did Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright use overlapping dialogue on the Ponderosa?

Not from the episodes I've seen. But Altman undoubtedly learned the ropes well enough to go a different way with confidence; to borrow from another medium, he painted well before he could paint like Picasso. And when Altman lost his cultural cool in the 1980s, he went back to television without blinking an eye, creating a smart, off-center series in HBO's "Tanner 88" on one hand and filming a straight-up but beautifully assured version of "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial" on the other. He didn't have a comeback with "The Player" (1994) -- we came back to him.

Some of Altman's feature films in these wilderness years seemed downright foolish, but have you actually seen "O.C. and Stiggs"? Derived from a National Lampoon column, the 1987 teen comedy is a blueprint for 1989's "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" not only in subject but in goofy, wise bonhomie. Plus it's the only movie to feature an appearance by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats. That's cool, yes, but it's also in keeping with the director's on going love affair with the creative act, whether in music, dance, or acting.

Altman's entire career is a mash note to the creative act and to the high that comes with it. His on-set modus operandi was to call "action" and let the actors' sense of character and danger take them where they would. This approach guaranteed inconsistency -- Altman didn't seem to mind much -- and, not surprisingly, there are self-indulgent performances in his films, as well as times when the director cruelly exposes his actors' limitations: Richard Gere and Farrah Fawcett in "Dr. T and the Women," Paul Newman in "Quintet."

Against that, put Susannah York in "Images," Sandy Dennis in "Come Back to the Five and Dime," George Segal and Elliott Gould in "California Split," Shelley Duvall in "3 Women," Lily Tomlin in "Nashville," Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." These are great, often uncategorizable performances that bristle with unstudied detail and seem to dissolve the walls between acting and life.

More to the point, they all seem part of the endless, milling, shadowed party that took place in the filmmaker's head and heart. Like many great artists (and mavericks), and in his singular shaggy-dog way, Robert Altman was obsessed. He made a single lifelong movie from countless different angles, and each one was a chunk of the infinite.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.