24 Rooms Nashville 

Filmmakers have often represented the process of filmmaking as a process of choosing and combining images. In Nashville, Robert Altman instead models his narrative on the 24-track recording technology commonly used within the music industry by building the story around the parallel lives of 24 main characters involved in a political rally. Altman’s metaphor for cinema creation is based neither on film direction nor on cinematography, but on the process of mixing sound. Using multiple independent sound sources, Altman’s approach to sound replaces the single-channel linearity of written discourse by a three-dimensional multiplicity, calling for a radically different level and type of spectator – and especially auditor – activity. Instead of one picture following another in time, the film becomes a simultaneous space: a map or a floor plan.