1. 1975

Robert Altman's "Nashville" was released in 1975. We'd only recently pulled out of Vietnam; the energy crisis was upon us; Nixon had just resigned; and hardly anyone had heard of an oddly ambitious Southern governor named Jimmy Carter.

The world of filmmaking and filmgoing circa 1975 seems just as remote. The idea of studying movies in college was new and exciting; the filmmakers of the French New Wave still had some vitality; screenplays and collections of movie reviews were regularly published -- indeed, a film critic, Pauline Kael, was one of the country's most argued-over intellectuals; the annual summer onslaught of action-adventure extravaganzas was as yet unanticipated. Repertory houses showing older and foreign films could be found in many cities, and colleges were the homes of competing film series.

Most of the big hits of the 1970s were as square as they've always been, but there was always something for movie buffs to quarrel about. Had Godard blown it by embracing Maoism and video? Were Bertolucci and Bellochio really the equal of Antonioni and Fellini? Why were so few people aware of Ichikawa?

In America, the World War II/Korean War generation of filmmakers -- Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, Altman, Arthur Penn -- was in full bloom at the same time the "film generation" baby boomers (Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese) were introducing a new cosmopolitan art consciousness into American movies. There were heroes to root for and bad guys to hiss; the model was "the artist" vs. "the businessman."

With the release of "Nashville" and "Jaws," the summer of '75 delivered both the culmination -- and the beginning of the end -- of that period. "Nashville" seemed to incarnate a film buff's hopes for American movies. Here was an artist putting the machinery of popular culture to work for the sake of art, yet entering into the spirit of popular culture and partaking of its energy too. That was the dream: the power of popular art combined with the complexity of fine art, high and low not at war, and not blurred indistinguishably into each other, but embracing.

"Nashville" was debated in the mainstream press in a way that seems inconceivable now: The New York Times ran at least eight pieces about the movie, and editorial writers and critics weighed in with opinions and interpretations for months after the film opened. (The movie's 25th anniversary isn't going unnoted. The Times and Premiere have already run major pieces about Altman; Fox Television will broadcast a documentary about him, "Altman: On His Own Terms," on August 13; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened the film on June 22 in Los Angeles, with Altman and various cast and crew members in attendance; and, in November, Simon & Schuster will publish "The 'Nashville' Chronicles," by the Newsday film critic Jan Stuart. Paramount will release the DVD version, offering its proper Panavision screen-aspect ratio, on August 15.)

But it was "Jaws" that captured the mass audience and really changed movies. It wasn't the first big success of the boomer generation, but it was a hit on a scale no one had ever seen before. (Within a month of its release, the stock of MCI, the conglomerate that owned the film company that released "Jaws," went up 22 points.) The aftereffects of "Jaws" rattled the world of film from top to bottom: Soon the artists were coming a cropper -- Altman spent the rest of the decade creating ever-more-perverse head-scratchers; Coppola spent years on the debilitating "Apocalypse Now," and seems never to have recovered his energy or concentration; Scorsese tripped himself up making the over-ambitious, epic musical, "New York, New York." In 1977, George Lucas' "Star Wars" was released, and the intellectual and art side of filmmaking and filmgoing has been scattered to the four winds ever since. Despite the occasional good movie, the news since has all been about technology, effects, gender, race and business.

Through most of the '70s, Robert Altman ran a kind of medicine ball caravan of an operation, and, following his work, you could feel like a participant in an ongoing party. He was a hip impresario, moving from detective movie to western to gangster movie, tweaking and twisting them, demanding more of these genres than they were used to providing. If Peckinpah was the barbaric, bitter celebrator of boozy grandeur, staking it all on the one great certain-to-lose gesture, Altman played the margins with a slipstream elegance, keeping a variety of bets in play at once. Tall and charismatic, with a goatee and long fine hands, he looked like something out of a Mark Twain story -- a frontier campaign manager, perhaps, or a riverboat gambler turned grandee.

He enjoyed shooting his mouth off about the cowardice of studio executives -- he always seemed to need an enemy -- and about his own preferences in drugs, booze and actresses. He brought to the movies a no-big-deal elegance; a taste for risk, humor and the unhinged; a hatred of rigidity and the overbearing; and an intransigent take-it-or-leave-it spirit. He also had -- and still does have -- an intoxicating line of California-zen "It's the art, man" baloney, and a hipster/psychic's ability to find (and touch) you where, as we used to say, you really live. I once had lunch with him for a magazine interview, and by the end of it was ready to follow him anywhere. It took me a day to come to my senses and realize I'd been snowed.

As an essayist about popular culture, Altman was our Godard; in his view of life as a sad/funny circus, he was our Fellini; in the way he looked for truth in the souls of actresses, he was our Bergman; in the way he always saw people as part of a larger context, he was our Renoir. He's also a natural joker, a satirist at heart (even as he dreams of tragedy and art), a profane and lowdown American who can't put on fancy European airs without looking foolish -- not that that stops him from trying. (Altman's an orchestrater and conductor of genius, but as a composer he's a dry well.) But when he messed with pop and film archetypes -- western heroes, frontier hookers, country-bumpkin thieves -- he could deliver a many-layered experience.

The jokey babble of "MASH," the vanishing-before-you melancholy of "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," the offhand goof "The Long Goodbye," the from-the-peripheries tone poem "Thieves Like Us" -- different as they were -- all seemed spun off the same reel. On the surface were familiar, linear story landmarks; beneath and around them burbled impressions and half-formed thoughts, feelings, and perceptions organized according to modernist art principles. Altman often works with what you're not used to noticing or admitting to consciousness, what you normally tune out: objects and actions at the edges of your vision, overheard sounds, half-formed thoughts, hazy memories. He draws you away from what you usually focus on, and into less-familiar areas. What can't be transcribed is often the point. A quality of revelation runs parallel to (and intermingles with) the surface throughout; part of the beauty of his movies is the way your attention flickers back and forth between these two levels, often unsure which is which. Some years back, a maker of CD-ROMs told me how eager he was to see Altman's then-new "Short Cuts": "Altman was making nonlinear multimedia before the form existed," he said.

2. America, after the breakdown

There was a third kind of film Altman has made over and over again -- films whipped up out of nothing but how he makes movies. Over and over, from "Brewster McCloud" to "H.E.A.L.T.H." to "Ready to Wear," they've been duds. "Nashville" is the great exception. There's an exultant quality to it, as though the artist is glorying in his prowess, that can remind you of Picasso once he learned to cut loose with his own language. It's a satirical musical comedy worked up around the idea that an independent/outsider presidential candidate -- calling his new organization the Replacement Party -- is coming to town to throw a fundraising (and publicity-garnering) concert.

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