Nashville

Nashville

Opening Shot

A record advertisement. A voice announces the cast the way a carnival barker announces acts. Twenty-four characters. Five days. Nashville, Tennessee. Robert Altman opens with a commercial because Nashville is about the commercialization of everything: country music, politics, faith, grief, ambition. Paul Lohmann's camera enters the city through car windshields and club doorways, finding stories already in progress, joining them mid-sentence.

What It Does

Lohmann's camera operates like a documentary crew dropped into fiction. Multiple-microphone recording captures overlapping conversations (Altman's signature technique), and Lohmann's compositions frequently include two or three scenes happening simultaneously in the same frame. The camera drifts between characters without hierarchy: the country star, the political operative, the gospel singer, the would-be assassin, the runaway wife. Everyone gets the same visual treatment. Nobody is the protagonist. The city is the protagonist.

The songs (written and performed by the actors themselves) function as character monologues delivered through country music convention. Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" won the Oscar and works both as a legitimate country song and as the most passive-aggressive seduction technique in cinema. Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean performs songs that expose her psychological fragility to audiences who hear beautiful music and miss the distress signal. The music is always doing double duty.

The ensemble is too large to single out, which is the point. Altman got performances from twenty-four principals by trusting actors to develop their own characters and then filming the interactions with multiple cameras. The result feels less directed than observed. Lily Tomlin's gospel singer, suppressing desire. Ned Beatty's lawyer, suppressing everything. Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton, suppressing nothing. The characters don't know they're in the same film, which is how cities work.

Why It's on the List

Altman made the most structurally ambitious American film of the 1970s, a decade with no shortage of ambition. Nashville predicted the intersection of entertainment and politics (the film's political campaign is a recognizable predecessor to the media-driven campaigns that followed), and it did so through a formal innovation that nobody has matched: a film with no protagonist, no traditional narrative arc, and no hierarchy of attention that still builds to a climax that feels inevitable. The assassination at the concert is the most shocking scene in 1970s American cinema because Altman spent 150 minutes teaching you that anything could happen to anyone.

The Argument Against

The twenty-four-character structure means no single storyline gets the attention it might deserve. Some threads feel barely sketched. The political satire, while prescient, can feel broad compared to the character work. And the deliberate formlessness, which is the film's innovation, can also make it feel undisciplined: some viewers experience Nashville not as a living tapestry but as a film that can't decide what it's about.

Closing Image

Barbara Jean is shot. The crowd panics, then doesn't. A woman nobody has noticed (Albuquerque, played by Barbara Harris) picks up the microphone and starts singing "It Don't Worry Me." The crowd calms down. They sing along. The camera pulls back to show hundreds of people singing a song about not caring while a woman bleeds on the stage behind them. The American capacity for turning tragedy into content, filmed before anyone had that vocabulary. Altman saw it in 1975.