Nashville is Altman’s 11th feature film, released in 1975 to high praise. It features an ensemble cast including Altman favourites Shelley Duvall and Elliott Gould and follows the events of five days in Nashville, Tennessee during the campaign of an independent presidential candidate who, incidentally, never actually appears on film. The process through which the story came about is described in ALTMAN, a documentary film directed by Ron Mann that covers the life and work of the filmmaker. When screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury arrived with her journal in Nashville, Tennessee on assignment from Altman, she was welcomed to the city by a two-hour delay on the interstate. Accordingly, the film opens on a multi-car highway pileup with characters and extras introduced as they emerge from cars to wait it out. Throughout the making of the film, plotlines, scenes, and characters were collaged together, resulting in a soft incoherence as no single story ever quite manages to take, and keep, the stage.
"Nothing hit as quickly as a Charli XCX track, and not much had stayed with me as long as even a sketch on my studio-mate’s wall. Nashville though, got through. "
A wannabe singer who can’t carry a tune ends up the unwitting participant in a strip show, having mistaken it for a legitimate gig, and to her friend and co-worker’s exasperation, her dreams are no more diminished for the experience, her pride fully intact. Even Haven Hamilton, the blowhard king of the country music scene, is granted grace: after spending the entirety of the film singing tenderly about the greatness of America (evident, according to the lyrics, in that it is old) and the trials of kicking his mistress out of the family home, he is shown in the film’s final moments to have that core instinct for what a crowd needs most in a moment of crisis that every great performer and wiley politician must possess.
In spite of rivalries, infidelities, and comically outsized aspirations at stardom, the characters of Nashville are not punished to feed a narrative arc, nor is any one elevated to the heights of hero or foil. When Carridine, as Tom Frank, sings “I’m Easy”, he is singing to a country bar audience but speaking directly to Linnea Reese, played by Lily Tomlin, the one woman in the world who he wakes up still thinking about the next morning. It is a rich scene, as the camera lands on face after face, each one a protagonist with a full life already imaginable from their brief moments on screen. Nowhere but in movies could you look into a room and know the secret loves, motivations, and shameful aspirations of so many people at once, and yet every bar, concert hall, and backyard of a party that won’t notice when you leave early feels familiar in Nashville.
Throughout the film, the sound is composed like a crowded room, drifting between conversations that overlap and interrupt, and no more than a few scenes are granted to each member of the ensemble. Their voices overlap, and people behave as people do: stupidly, sentimentally, surprisingly, and sweetly, all at once and in the strangest moments. When it premiered, the actual stars and figures of the American Country and Western scene bemoaned the music as inauthentic, an unsurprising complaint considering Altman encouraged the actors, almost all without musical training or experience, to write or co-write their own songs for the film. As Pauline Kael wrote in her landmark review at the time though, it was the feeling of country music that the film captured, if not the exact rhythms and vocabulary, and it is this—the emphasis on what feels true as opposed to what is accurate—that hooked me on Nashville.
"Their voices overlap, and people behave as people do: stupidly, sentimentally, surprisingly, and sweetly, all at once and in the strangest moments."
Early in ALTMAN, the director discusses his first use of this multi-track, overlapping dialogue technique in a 1967 film about the space race. At the time, the method got him fired and banned from the production lot. As justification for it Altman says, “I was just trying to get the illusion of reality”. Without the comfort of narrative laid over our lives, they come undone, falling into simple sequences of events, unrelated and unintentioned. We are each our own main characters, no matter how close at hand we keep the realities of others; only in the illusory world of a well-told story is it possible to witness bits and pieces of the private lives of everyone whose voice you overhear in a packed crowd. It takes a little of something false to get at what feels true of living. In the unreality of witnessing five days in Nashville, Tennessee through musical interludes and a cast of 24 main characters, I found something akin to the powerful transference of experience made available in a form of art I’ve loved for far longer than film, the abstract landscape.
Abstraction takes what isn’t there in direct representation to show what is, communicated through colour, form, and shape. Feeling, intention, and the experience of time on the body become available in forms of expression that allow for a shift away from precise reproduction, opening space between the world and what it feels like to live in it. Depicting exactly what you see is rarely the point.
In trying to figure out my unprecedented love for Nashville, there was one landscape in particular that I pictured. I remember so clearly when I first approached Willem de Kooning’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, an abstract landscape painted in 1963, the sense of seeing something true. I was 22, in the backend of a wander around Europe following an outdoor painting course that had been largely characterized by unseasonable rain. Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point hung at the end of a wall in Amsterdam's Stedelijk museum , last in a line of giant expressionist works. In the painting, dawn is thick strokes of colour; muted pastels and bright, warm tones surround sections of white that almost, but never quite, cohere into a recognizable shape. The fleshy pinks and hints of washed out green are smeared and scraped across the canvas—paint layered over itself until a new landscape forms on the image surface. Like a miracle, the dawn appears.
I have never been to Louse Point, a sandy finger of land that curls in towards Springs, New York, but you can image-search its sunrises and see gold suns fall into soft waves. There is nothing in those photos of dawns over Louse Point though that captures the sense that de Kooning’s brushwork conveys, that of the warmth and wonder of the very first hints of light as they roll up over the horizon to reach your one little spot on the spinning globe. In the buttery lines of cool yellow that butt up against cold, flat, white is something of real life. Within the painting is an equation of colour, shape, and composition; scratches in baby-blue and swatches of goldenrod add together to create the exact sense of being the only one in the world awake, witness to the first, pale breaks of dawn on water.
What feels “real” is never exactly what it appears to be. When film is compared to painting, it’s often in reference to literally abstract frames: plays of light and colour in lieu of legible figures or ground on screen. Nashville’s abstraction is built into the world that it offers—the illusory, improbable, unbelievable world—one that is only available in the distance between what feels real and what is immediately there. An illusion of reality that feels a little bit sweeter, a little more true, than the real thing.
Nashville is Altman’s 11th feature film, released in 1975 to high praise. It features an ensemble cast including Altman favourites Shelley Duvall and Elliott Gould and follows the events of five days in Nashville, Tennessee during the campaign of an independent presidential candidate who, incidentally, never actually appears on film. The process through which the story came about is described in ALTMAN, a documentary film directed by Ron Mann that covers the life and work of the filmmaker. When screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury arrived with her journal in Nashville, Tennessee on assignment from Altman, she was welcomed to the city by a two-hour delay on the interstate. Accordingly, the film opens on a multi-car highway pileup with characters and extras introduced as they emerge from cars to wait it out. Throughout the making of the film, plotlines, scenes, and characters were collaged together, resulting in a soft incoherence as no single story ever quite manages to take, and keep, the stage.
"Nothing hit as quickly as a Charli XCX track, and not much had stayed with me as long as even a sketch on my studio-mate’s wall. Nashville though, got through. "
A wannabe singer who can’t carry a tune ends up the unwitting participant in a strip show, having mistaken it for a legitimate gig, and to her friend and co-worker’s exasperation, her dreams are no more diminished for the experience, her pride fully intact. Even Haven Hamilton, the blowhard king of the country music scene, is granted grace: after spending the entirety of the film singing tenderly about the greatness of America (evident, according to the lyrics, in that it is old) and the trials of kicking his mistress out of the family home, he is shown in the film’s final moments to have that core instinct for what a crowd needs most in a moment of crisis that every great performer and wiley politician must possess.
In spite of rivalries, infidelities, and comically outsized aspirations at stardom, the characters of Nashville are not punished to feed a narrative arc, nor is any one elevated to the heights of hero or foil. When Carridine, as Tom Frank, sings “I’m Easy”, he is singing to a country bar audience but speaking directly to Linnea Reese, played by Lily Tomlin, the one woman in the world who he wakes up still thinking about the next morning. It is a rich scene, as the camera lands on face after face, each one a protagonist with a full life already imaginable from their brief moments on screen. Nowhere but in movies could you look into a room and know the secret loves, motivations, and shameful aspirations of so many people at once, and yet every bar, concert hall, and backyard of a party that won’t notice when you leave early feels familiar in Nashville.
Throughout the film, the sound is composed like a crowded room, drifting between conversations that overlap and interrupt, and no more than a few scenes are granted to each member of the ensemble. Their voices overlap, and people behave as people do: stupidly, sentimentally, surprisingly, and sweetly, all at once and in the strangest moments. When it premiered, the actual stars and figures of the American Country and Western scene bemoaned the music as inauthentic, an unsurprising complaint considering Altman encouraged the actors, almost all without musical training or experience, to write or co-write their own songs for the film. As Pauline Kael wrote in her landmark review at the time though, it was the feeling of country music that the film captured, if not the exact rhythms and vocabulary, and it is this—the emphasis on what feels true as opposed to what is accurate—that hooked me on Nashville.
"Their voices overlap, and people behave as people do: stupidly, sentimentally, surprisingly, and sweetly, all at once and in the strangest moments."
Early in ALTMAN, the director discusses his first use of this multi-track, overlapping dialogue technique in a 1967 film about the space race. At the time, the method got him fired and banned from the production lot. As justification for it Altman says, “I was just trying to get the illusion of reality”. Without the comfort of narrative laid over our lives, they come undone, falling into simple sequences of events, unrelated and unintentioned. We are each our own main characters, no matter how close at hand we keep the realities of others; only in the illusory world of a well-told story is it possible to witness bits and pieces of the private lives of everyone whose voice you overhear in a packed crowd. It takes a little of something false to get at what feels true of living. In the unreality of witnessing five days in Nashville, Tennessee through musical interludes and a cast of 24 main characters, I found something akin to the powerful transference of experience made available in a form of art I’ve loved for far longer than film, the abstract landscape.
Abstraction takes what isn’t there in direct representation to show what is, communicated through colour, form, and shape. Feeling, intention, and the experience of time on the body become available in forms of expression that allow for a shift away from precise reproduction, opening space between the world and what it feels like to live in it. Depicting exactly what you see is rarely the point.
In trying to figure out my unprecedented love for Nashville, there was one landscape in particular that I pictured. I remember so clearly when I first approached Willem de Kooning’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, an abstract landscape painted in 1963, the sense of seeing something true. I was 22, in the backend of a wander around Europe following an outdoor painting course that had been largely characterized by unseasonable rain. Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point hung at the end of a wall in Amsterdam's Stedelijk museum , last in a line of giant expressionist works. In the painting, dawn is thick strokes of colour; muted pastels and bright, warm tones surround sections of white that almost, but never quite, cohere into a recognizable shape. The fleshy pinks and hints of washed out green are smeared and scraped across the canvas—paint layered over itself until a new landscape forms on the image surface. Like a miracle, the dawn appears.
I have never been to Louse Point, a sandy finger of land that curls in towards Springs, New York, but you can image-search its sunrises and see gold suns fall into soft waves. There is nothing in those photos of dawns over Louse Point though that captures the sense that de Kooning’s brushwork conveys, that of the warmth and wonder of the very first hints of light as they roll up over the horizon to reach your one little spot on the spinning globe. In the buttery lines of cool yellow that butt up against cold, flat, white is something of real life. Within the painting is an equation of colour, shape, and composition; scratches in baby-blue and swatches of goldenrod add together to create the exact sense of being the only one in the world awake, witness to the first, pale breaks of dawn on water.
What feels “real” is never exactly what it appears to be. When film is compared to painting, it’s often in reference to literally abstract frames: plays of light and colour in lieu of legible figures or ground on screen. Nashville’s abstraction is built into the world that it offers—the illusory, improbable, unbelievable world—one that is only available in the distance between what feels real and what is immediately there. An illusion of reality that feels a little bit sweeter, a little more true, than the real thing.