Exhausted America
“Exhausted America” presents a trio of films, in rare 16mm and 35mm formats, that collectively speak to a country at the end of its physical, psychological, and economic tether. Inspired by Northwestern professor Heather Hendershot’s description of Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE (1975) as a film “about America, a country that has reached the point of political exhaustion in the wake of Vietnam, Nixon, assassinations – a hangover from the 1960s that has segued into the despair and cynicism of the 1970s,” this series offers three stark, yet utterly engrossing visions of American life, from the daily grind of hardscrabble existence to the knock-down, drag-out ethos of its economic and political contests.
Each of the films in “Exhausted America” is organized around a competition, from the grueling Depression-era dance marathon of Sydney Pollack’s THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969) to the political grandstanding of NASHVILLE, to the promotional-stunt-turned-existential drama of S.R. Bindler’s beloved 1997 documentary HANDS ON A HARDBODY. Likewise, underlying each film’s examination of capitalism’s winner-take-all logic is the suspicion, per Hendershot’s characterization of NASHVILLE as a “cinema of losers”, that individualism only produces pyrrhic victories.
