Robert Altman and Nashville

Sawhill was an NYU film student in 1975, thus a product of the film culture that emerged in the late 1960s / early 1970s. Respond to his opinion of post-1975 American film culture (part 3, "A Cinema of Information.") Do you agree or disagree with his assumptions, observations, and conclusions?

 

Sawhill discusses being at the theater on opening day for Nashville and seeing Altman, running up to him and asking him for an autograph, treating him like a god.  He describes films by people like Altman and The Godfather by Coppola as an art that gives the viewer everything they could ever need.  He criticizes the baby-boomers coming in and taking control.  He ridicules them and refers to them as businessmen.  He rubs me the wrong way with this, he makes it seem like the filmmakers pre-baby boomers perfected cinema and then the young hungry businessmen moved in, kicked Altman out, sent him to New York to direct plays and then to France, as untalented and believes they just try to duplicate what has already been done.  All the techniques used by Altman became the norm and he was booted out.  He says that now he has fallen out of love with movie going.  I was confused how he made post-1975 Hollywood seem like young power kicking out the old and trying to make an easy penny by standing on the shoulders of the great men that came before them.  In class, I thought we discussed how it has always been like that.

 

 

What does Sawhill suggest are the functions of the recurring “wires, phones, intercoms, cameras, mikes, speakers” throughout the film? [Note: Read the whole article before responding, don't just look for this list of devices in the article.]

 

 

Altman uses these objects to show that all the people in Nashville are always recording themselves.  Trying to create themselves then let their own personalities form.  Altman makes the people of Nashville look pretentious and fake (which had many of the resident furious, thinking the film would be a testament).  The author went to Nashville a few years after the film was released and found that Altman was not that far off.  He describes Nashville with a long quote, “Altman treats Nashville as a provincial New York or Hollywood, as one of the places where the culture manufactures its image of itself (this is Nashville in the early stages of getting slick and L.A.-ified). Altman shows us the image, and what goes into creating and sustaining it. He cuts between public functions and private domestic scenes; he shoots in studios and theaters, from onstage and from behind control booths. We gather that this is a culture that believes that its self-image accounts, or ought to account, for everything. And its image of itself is cheerful, upbeat, carefree: "It don't worry me," people sing.”  The aspect of all the recording objects makes the people look lost in their own environment.  Altman plays with pop culture and the world’s madness associated with the spotlight of celebrity.  Everyone wants to be a celebrity and then blames the world when they don’t find any.  Sawhill writes, “With its profusion of wires, recording and communication devices, its mirrors and reflections and its concern with language, playacting, time and revelation.”

 

Which of Altman’s stylistic techniques does Sawhill associate with "inclusiveness"?

 

One of Altman’s great techniques was to use more than one camera, this way the actors couldn’t play for the camera, not knowing which shot would be edited and used in the film…brilliant but expensive.  Sawhill writes, “The sound systems he developed with the sound engineers Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin let him record and present more ambient and minor-character noise than we'd been used to. With his cinematographers -- during this period, usually Vilmos Zsigmond and, here, Paul Lohmann -- Altman used multiple cameras and lighted entire environments, not just individual shots. This gave his actors an unusual freedom of movement; it also meant that, since they often didn't know from which direction they were being filmed, or which angle was likely to be used in the final cut, they couldn't play to a camera.”  The article talks about the beauty Altman had with shaping his actresses, some of the article made me wonder if he was sleeping with all of them.  The author describes the brilliance in the acting by stating, “The stages and studios of "Nashville" are full of professionals, but the stars themselves are near-amateurs, or very skilled at playing near-amateurs. Someone who really connects (like the Ronee Blakley character) can be a lightning rod for our frustrations.”