I haven't seen it yet.
But it seems to be a film with more than one stories running parallel...
something that became extremely popular in later years
Mystery Train, Amores Perros, Babel, Yuva, Crash, Magnolia...
The list goes on...
But which was the FIRST of them all?
Was it Nashville?
Please help me out.
You left out Short Cuts, Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Syriana, Sin City, Love Actually, Snatch, Bobby, and Lock, Stock and two smoking barrles.
I don't know about movies, but the first thing EVER I can think of with parallel stories was A Tale of Two Cities.
First thing that came to mind for me was Intolerance (1916) which involved four completely distinct stories set at different times in history, intercut for comparison purposes. Even earlier there was Cabiria (1914), an Italian epic with multiple parallel stories around characters who interacted with each other and around the same events, and The Birth of A Nation (1915), which fits pretty much the same description.
If you want to skip past the silent films, A Tale of Two Cities (1935) meets our search criteria, as does Grand Hotel (1932) and The Women (1939) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949).
In a modern style of realism similar to Nashville or Short Cuts or Crash, we could cite La Dolce Vita (1960), The Last Picture Show (1971), and MASH (1972).
Another modern example, and I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned, would be Dazed and Confused. Anyone else notice a parallel?
shareThe most obvious influence for Robert Altman would be The Rules of the Game.
shareMASH was the first fiilm to ever use "overlapping dialogue". Altman thought the "I talk and then stop, and then you talk after I'm done" was an unnatural way of looking at conversations in real life so, he changed it. He almost got fired for it. It became his trademark.
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion - Edward Abbey
[MASH was the first film to ever use "overlapping dialogue".]
This is not true. There is overlapping dialogue in His Girl Friday (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) to name just a few.
In fact many of Howard Hawks' screwball comedies used the technique. There may be earlier films, but His Girl Friday is one that appears a lot in film books.
Nashville is an excellent, indeed archetypal, film that uses a network narrative. There is an excellent essay on films that use network narration in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Poetics-Cinema-David-Bordwell/dp/0415977797/ref=tmm_pap_title_popover_0
The end of the essay features a list of about 200 films that use the network narrative form, and that list is now 2 years old, so there are probably many more newer films.
Maybe I got it wrong.. MASH was first in doing something, or else Altman was the first to bring it back or something like that.. I can't recall where I heard this beign talked about. Maybe MASH was the first to have overlapping complete conversations and situations or something. Anyway, he took credit for it... Or they gave him credit for it. I remember Welles' doing that in his films and the Marx brothers done it too, did they not? I had just forgotten.
Thanks for the heads up on the book.
Life Is A Bucket Of Sh*t With A Barbed Wire Handle ~~ Jim Thompson
MASH was the first major movie to use the F word. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.
shareLa Dolce Vita focussed on one character mostly though.
Nashville is the first i know of to juggle multiple characters and narratives; as in, a lot of them, with an episodic structure, utilizing a mosaic approach to make a cultural/social point. The films that do this now are far more obvious, and usually contain one or two scenes that link everything together in a corny or stupid way.
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and I'm sure maybe a few others have that weren't as popular.
shareNashville wasn't event he first on the decade to do it. American Graffiti came out in '73
shareAs somebody already noted above, American Graffiti (1973) is probably the first real parallel-story-line movie. At least I don't know any earlier ones. If somebody does, then let us know.
share