Join us on Monday the 1st of July from 7pm (film starts at 7:15pm) for a screening of Robert Altman’s classic Nashville (1975). The film is 2 hours 40 minutes long so the screening will finish at 9:55pm.
Following 24 main characters, Nashville’s grandiose scale makes the city’s country music scene a microcosm for the nation at large, with their personal lives and ambitions set against the backdrop of America’s bicentennial anniversary. Altman’s roving camera and “hyperlink” style of storytelling unify the characters’ diverse stories, painting a portrait of America’s fragmented psyche post-Watergate. At once a satire, a drama, and a musical, Nashville is both a culmination of Altman’s freewheeling style, an exploration of complex characters, and one of the greatest explorations of the absurd contradictions that shape American culture.
From Molly Haskell’s essay on the film for the Criterion release:
If anything, the America that Nashville doled out with stunning prescience in 1975 has become only more so in the subsequent four decades—more addled, its politicians more outrageous, its fundamentalists more strident, its divas more delusional, the lines separating news, politics, and entertainment more blurred than ever. Indeed, political campaigns would turn so farcical in the wake of Nashville that Altman’s brilliantly oblique take on the subject—the campaign truck of the unseen independent candidate Hal Phillip Walker (invented and recorded by the real-life Mississippian Thomas Hal Phillips), blaring its way through the film—was more effective than any direct hit.
For more on Nashville, read Geoff Andrew’s essay for Sight and Sound magazine. Additionally, to further explore Altman’s expansive filmography read the BFI’s article on where to begin.