As a film critic, the question that I am asked more than any other is: “What is your favorite film?” For decades, I have given the same answer. But in the past 10 years about 10 years, when I say: “My favorite film is” Nashville “”, I must always wonder if the person I’m talking about has even heard of it. Many did not do it. A handle has heard of it in a way “oh, yes, on the right”. The rest, a distinct minority, knows exactly what I’m talking about. I can always say it by the gaze in someone’s eyes when I came across a believer’s “nashville” comrade.
For the first time, I saw Robert Altman, a teeming, extending, exulting, tragic, transporting, which was released 50 years ago (the release date was June 11, 1975), when I was first-year student at university. The film had an effect on me which is difficult to describe. I didn’t just fell in love with that. I did not become obsessed with that. The tumultuous beauty of “Nashville” struck me so hard that the film reshaped my identity. I was like a boomer who had just seen the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” and who had now seen the light.
For the next six months, I never stopped thinking of “Nashville”. I dreamed about it. I meditated on it and I lived inside. The film has literally resumed my imagination. And this process has created in me a strange feeling of faith. Because what “Nashville” showed me – completely, and for the first time – was the world in which I lived. The film made me realize that I cherished from America, and it also made me realize that America was a place where the center no longer held. It raised an enticing enigma: how could I be so hard for a collapsed world?
In “Nashville”, we spend 2 hours and 40 minutes after 24 characters as they wander in the capital of the campaign music over a five -day period, the randomness of their meetings turning into drama before your eyes. You feel like you are seeing a documentary; Everything seems and seems “real”. But this is not the case! It’s Altman magic. He was like a fusion of James Joyce and Da Pennebaker, a filmmaker who plunged you into outsourced 3D effusiveness of every moment. “Nashville” has the attraction of a cross soap with the glory of a musical crossed with the primary power of reality.
I was a teenager in the 1970s, an era that is romanticized now, and for a good reason (there was a lot of freedom, a lot of passion, a lot of good music, a lot of freaking out). But there was a strange spiritual way at that time. As a culture, we no longer believed in the healthy suburban dream of the 1950s. We no longer believed in the hippie dream of the 60s. Landing on the moon was a science fiction dream which, in five minutes, felt like a replay. The era was full of false religions (East! Vercers extraterrestrials! Lou Reed solo albums!), And like each of these things dropped you, you have a haunting question: was there something that remained this united America?
When I looked at “Nashville”, which I did many times (at the time pre -VHS – I saw it in cinema societies and theaters of college representatives), what it showed me is that America was no longer so much a fusion pot as an epic pan that was not completely frost. Everyone was talking, and life became more and more dispersed and random – a perception integrated into the very form of Altman’s film. (This is the essence of his genius.) I do not think that it is too exaggerated to say that Altman, in 1975, provided for the Internet era, as well as the era in which we are now: a fractured, exploded, atomized, Balkanized, separate, separated from itself. What “Nashville” shows us is the big American crack-up. However, when Ronee Blakley, as a country star Barbara Jean, gets up on stage at the Opry Belle to sing “Tapedeck in his tractor” and “Dues” is one of the most transcendent sequences in the history of cinema. For a few heartbreaking moments, the joy of the house of its performance seems to bring together the world of America, giving us all a desperate reason to believe.
