Nashville

Known for its scope of the characters, the film presents itself as a complex world, allowing the audience to dig into and explore more about their world as an outsider. The camera in the film, therefore, is objective and uninterested, and almost like a documentary camera. The most apparent aspect is that the camera never focuses on a character for too long in order to convince the audience that he/she is the protagonist. Throughout the film, the audience is always in the process of figuring out whose story they are looking at, and which is the main thread. It is extremely unconventional for a camera to behave like this, as it is not biased towards any of the characters. While watching the film, the audience keeps track of a totality of all of the main characters. At the same time, the details of the characters’ background stories are left out, allowing the audience to picture the characters’ life. The audience would then imagine the characters’ lives as they would when they make acquaintance with people in real life. Furthermore, the diegetic sound throughout the film also emphasizes the indifferent camera. Most of the time in the film, I was not able to distinguish the different layers of sounds or conversations in the scenes. My inability of distinguishing the sounds suggests that the director does not want us to focus on only one conversation. What the director wants to present is a chaotic melting pot of the characters, which is analogous to the situation in the United States. One example is when every character started to leave the airport in their cars, the camera portrays all of the exiting actions of the cars, instead of focusing on the individual characters. We can never really see the characters, but only their cars (the exteriority). The camera is fixed near the exit of the parking lot, rarely moving. The diegetic sounds include the screeching of the cars, as well as the broadcast that advocates for the candidate. What is noticeable is that the broadcast gradually becomes inaudible as the broadcast van exits the lot. The director’s “microphone” does not try to follow the sound to help us listen to the whole speech. Instead, it simply stays there and let the audio disappear, as the camera now focuses on the other characters. The indifference of the narrative is also illustrated in the poster of the film. The poster does not have any human figures on it. Instead, we see a personified uncanny figure with nationalist, feminine and musical symbols. It reminds me of Altman’s other film MASH, also picturing a non-human figure. The non-humanness of the poster is a satire towards the USA spirit (“We are the people“), as if it is saying that the aggregate of the people is merely an uncanny and inhuman figure, with strangely combined features. The juxtaposition of different

Killing of the female character the demands in the viewer; more demands in the materials Broadcast — the fluidity of the space the female singer is the victim of the marriage The dramatize the celebrity theme — How lives intersect The indifferent and omniscient camera The reason of having the affair? Every character is flawed — no ideal characters Transition from space to space

The serenading scene: is he singing a sincere song? “Easy” as he is available to people, but w Love is a fantasy; love is a narcissistic image projection The quiet and still camera. All of the characters are in the camera, but only one character is in the focus.

The homeric readers know the ending of the story. The modern readers are inhibited from the back and forth in the storytelling the story in the background and happening quietly; the readers need to step back and then see the pattern The portray of the society is suspended in the air. The portray of the love relationship The BBC reporter — the problem of the exposition; the anti Altman Representation of the world; the device that reminds the the replicated experience. Transition: due to his desire to portray the huge social organism

• the actors passing each other
• sound, radio: at the concert; the recording rooms; the dialogue does not match up with the visual Overarching logic: the arbitrariness of the transitions of the scene; the subject of the film is never an individual