USA,
1975, 159 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
-
Robert Altman
- prod
-
Robert Altman
- scr
-
Joan Tewkesbury
- cam
-
Paul Lohmann
- editor
-
Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin
- mus
-
Richard Baskin
- cast
-
Henry Gibson, Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakley, Keith Carradine, Ned Beatty, Karen Black
- source
-
Paramount Pictures, 5555 Melrose Ave, Sturges Bldg., Room 101, Los Angeles, CA 90038.
-
COMMENTS
Robert Altman was the Film Society Directing Award recipient in 2003.
OTHER
It seems clearer than ever that Nashville is not just Altman’s greatest achievement, but the film that most fully serves his vision of multiplicity, chaos and disorder, and the offsetting urge for some design that may turn an unruly nation into a story. There are so many questions raised by Nashville: Against the calculated industrial backdrop of the over-emotional country music, does America have room or energy left for true feeling? With America so given to demented liberties, is there any chance for national order or purpose? And in a world of such helplessly interacting blind lives, does anyone know where he or she is going? With so much going on, and with so little distinction between background and foreground, no Altman film makes fuller use of a sliding camera, shifting focus and the openness of sound. For good and ill, the political meaning rests in the film’s mise-en-scene. Moreover, it’s evident in Nashville that no one has worked so hard to find a way of seeing and hearing our complicated lives than Altman—or Jean-Luc Godard. And just as Godard found the city of the future, Alphaville, in the real Paris, so Nashville remains its vulgar, rowdy self and a disconcerting portrait of our ideal, the nowhere city.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #232
Our first seminar at the Festival was entitled Censorship and the Actor’s Art: A Symposium, featuring panelists Michael Mayer and Lou Greenspan at Grace Cathedral, October 24, 1966.
