Sound and Vision

Nashville is a startlingly original film, and much of the credit for this, as I've suggested, must go to Altman's careful control of what we hear. Basically, he filmed most scenes of the film with multiple centres of interest (that is to say, with 3 or 4 different activities or conversations going on within the cameras range), itself a result of having several major characters all as important as one another and all involved in different plots. He recorded each of these conversation etc. separately, and then in the sound mix balanced them out against each other so that either a) we hear one more clearly than the others, and pay attention to it, or b) we hear every thing that's going on, and have to choose for ourselves what we're going to pay attention to. That's kind of a simplified version of the technique, but I hope that you can see that it results in very stimulating viewing. The viewer is forced to participate in the creative process. God that sounds pretentious, but the net result of it all is that its possible to see Nashville a second or third time and see quite a different film.

This playing around with the soundtrack is first prominent in Altman's work in Mash, where often conversations overlap both each other and the divisions between scenes, and the characters themselves fool around with public address systems. Given this awareness of the potential of control of sound, it was only natural he should go on to make a film centred on the music industry.