As the fourth-born kid of five, like anyone from a big family, I grew up in an ensemble. We were spread enough in years that school kept us segregated by age, so we had two main gathering sites. The first was the dinner table, where the social task was to make a worthy offering to the highly opinionated conversation. Maybe there was no offering within reach, other family members being older and more experienced. Maybe you stood to underscore a point or fetched a dictionary to prove that “flaccid” is pronounced with a “k” in the middle or happened on a witty remark and sparked a few laughs or tried to vanish into the wallpaper to avoid negative attention. At its worst, it felt like a Lord of the Flies existence, at its best, an immersive lesson in sharing, claiming, and losing space that imparted a sensitivity to injustice. And it produced a steady habit of gathering evidence that everyone in a group has intrinsic value.

Our secondary communal area was the family room, with its hearth, the television. Here we fed on tortuous, unresolving soap operas, from Another World to Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; in the evening, there was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, Mission Impossible, Star Trek—shows peopled with interdependent characters whose preternatural competence or amusing eccentricity made them essential to the whole. That notion—that no one was dispensable—was reassuring to one haunted by the lifeboat scenario*: Who would be the first thrown to sea in a crisis? Should anyone be? For an empath in a household of multiple protagonists, this was more than a fantasy: it was how I absorbed and argued with stories.

As for cinema—where my K–12 viewing consisted mostly of Hollywood movies—that was dominated in the 1970s by omnibus vehicles like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), comedic ensemble pieces like Young Frankenstein (1974) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and dramas such as Days of Heaven (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Even when there was a clear protagonist, strong, balanced ensembles attracted me. Although I watched Golden-Age classics after school and, as I got older, late into the night, setting my alarm to catch an Astaire or Garbo picture I hadn’t seen, I didn’t think much about exactly what distinguished newer movies from old ones, aside from color stock and more naturalistic acting. At some point though—as the star system faltered, TV and independent film ascended, and genres turned on their heads—the protagonist was knocked out of the center, and characters and storylines proliferated. In every way, narratives were diversifying as I grew up, and so were the theories that appraised them.

This only became intelligible to my 1980s self, viewing the 1970s through the panoramic lens of Nashville, directed by Robert Altman and shot in CinemaScope to accommodate its densely populated parade of seekers. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the film, which Geoff Andrew, writing for the British Film Institute, called a “sprawling, multi-character, antiheroic, anti-climactic, anti-cathartic narrative.” When I first saw Nashville, all those antis spoke to something in me that had become a partisan of another anti—antiprotagonism.

By their nature, ensemble pieces make a case against protagonism, a term for the activity of a protagonist that could be defined contrarily as naming a narrative bias toward one character’s actions and subjectivity, often to the exclusion or even instrumentalization of that of others’. Protagonism manifests most extremely in the superhero movie, heir of the epic poem; in my youth it was Christopher Reeve’s Superman, who spun Earth and earthlings backwards to reverse time and save Lois Lane—talk about instrumentalizing the supporting cast.

Ursula LeGuin, echoing feminist theorists who preceded her but wrote in headier language (Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis, for example), critiqued this kind of outsized heroism in her essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1988). Our prehistory, she wrote, germinated two kinds of stories: mammoth hunters with their spears and bloody climactic killings represented one kind, while foragers with their carrier bags, children, and diffuse daily rhythms yielded another. The second type failed to match the excitement and bragging rights of the first, LeGuin argued. “Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.” Where the hunter’s way promotes tunnel vision in pursuit of a quest, the carrier bag theory and its queer, feminist, post-colonial siblings entertain stories that wander and digress, repeat, find wonder and complexity in the everyday. Quest and question—the singular hero’s journey versus proliferating subjects, with their Rashomon effects and their repudiation of a master narrative.

As I transitioned into and out of college, where I studied literature, and went to grad school for cinema studies, the question Whose story is this? preoccupied me more and more, whether at the theatre with Shakespeare, in a hammock with As I Lay Dying, or in front of a screen. Why did Vietnam movies always center Americans and background Vietnamese people? Why was Joan Micklin Silver—whose ensemble film about an alternative newspaper, Between the Lines (1977), played like an antidote to the bro-hero dynamic of All the President’s Men (1976)—the only woman director I could name? Why did Meryl Streep’s Joanna hate Dustin Hoffman’s Ted so much in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) that she would leave her adorable child behind with him? These are, of course, political questions, and they led to other political questions that were in plentiful supply and under intense exploration by feminists, theorists, and historians while Ronald Reagan’s America was helping to set the stage for Donald Trump’s. When I asked myself whose story it was, whatever the medium, I found I preferred an answer that was unclear or multiple.

In Nashville, as in much of Robert Altman’s work, every character is distinct and critically important, their place in time and space held for them by script and scenario. A script or even an improvisational premise is a placeholder for each performer that guarantees them a hearing. Nashville’s subject is a place and a culture more than any single character.

When a film has multiple protagonists, the viewer identifies less with individuals than with what binds them and what that connection might mean. Consider the atmosphere of emotional volatility in anything directed by John Cassavetes, who backed away from a successful Hollywood career to pioneer independent narrative filmmaking with his friends. Or the sense of loss and loneliness that threads the characters in P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) and sews them into a quilt with their solitary-yet-joint rendition of Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.” Or the electric heat and unrest of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), the communitarian idealism of Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), the pansexualism and yearning of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy. In a choral tone poem, actors must blend for balance.

It probably goes without saying that the Hollywood star system was fundamentally incompatible with a style of filmmaking that privileged the group over the individual. Little wonder that the two presidents most associated with Hollywood glitz—Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—have been credited with doing the most to advance authoritarianism in the United States. The hero-daddy who will fix everything, who squashes the efforts of people organizing for their betterment, would die a quick death in a nation where the common good truly mattered more than bootstrap success stories and sycophancy.

Three years after Nashville’s release, Charles Burnett completed his UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep (1978), not only creating a portrait of the Black and Latino South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up but introducing film production to the actors and young crew he assembled—kids from the neighborhood—to shoot it. The titular killer of sheep is less the protagonist, Stan, who works in a slaughterhouse, than the unseen societal forces behind the casual cruelty and deceptively random misfortune that plague the characters. That the production circumstances occasioned a democratization of access to filmmaking speaks to something in Charles Burnett that wanted more than his own aggrandizement as an auteur. Like Killer of Sheep, Burnett’s later work features balanced ensembles of characters—a family invaded by an old friend who brings trouble in To Sleep With Anger (1990), and the owner of a boarding house and her two delusional residents in The Annihilation of Fish (1999), released in 2024 after a quarter century of legal bureaucracy.

Charles Burnett was enormously influential among independent filmmakers, one of whom was Julie Dash, writer, director, and producer of Daughters of the Dust (1991). The film, shot with exquisite beauty and tenderness by Arthur Jafa, centers on the women of a Gullah family on the eve of their northern migration, as they gather for a farewell feast in honor of their great-grandmother, Nana, who will stay behind. In telling the stories of Black women from their perspectives, Dash told author and theorist bell hooks in an interview, she discovered that she “could not structure it as a normal, Western drama” but rather “the same way an African griot would recount a family’s history. The story would just kind of unravel.” Daughters of the Dust does unravel, across characters into their agrarian past through memory, flashback, and tradition, into the future through the promise of migration to the industrial north, and in the spectral character of the Unborn Child—a temporal calling in that echoes in the juke-joint sequence of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), with its throng of dancers that radiates in time and space.

In weaving its wandering narrative among several characters, Daughters of the Dust created an unprecedented vision of Black womanhood, a window on a hidden—or rather ignored—world. Each of the women in Daughters of the Dust speaks eloquently in assertion of her bodily sovereignty, whether in choosing not to divulge the identity of her rapist (Eula), taking a vow of sexual freedom and independence (Yellow Mary), or leaping from the boat at the last minute to ride off with her Cherokee beloved (Iona). The devastation of the family’s departure dissolves to a tranquil vision of changing in place, as Nana, Eula, and her husband Eli stroll in the surf. “We remained behind,” the Unborn Child’s voiceover says, “growing older, wiser, stronger.”

As I grew older, an early love of acting was reignited in the 2000s by an improv intensive with ace ensemblist Alan Arkin, who began his acting career with the improv troupe, The Second City. Now I had new reasons to think about the attractions of the ensemble, one being that it’s easier to memorize brief runs of lines than pages and pages of monologue, another that it’s more stimulating to exchange those lines onstage with foils, where the friction and unpredictability of human interaction give rise to a singular euphoria.

Perhaps these qualities are nowhere more evident than in performance improvisation, one of the practices found at the center of a cinema that decenters a single protagonist in favor of multiple subjects. Films that begin with a premise and build with input from actors are fascinating and mysterious studies in process because their ideation comes from and branches into so many directions. They are also studies in having a good time—who wouldn’t want to jump in the sandbox with the cast of Waiting for Guffman (1996) or Asteroid City (2023), into a community that has effectively become a company of friends?

I had kids who loved movies, and as they grew, Hollywood’s priorities narrowed around massive-budget Marvel films and their action-hero-obsessed ilk, and my priorities arranged themselves around those of my kids. How ironic it was that superheroes, straining against their paradigm, teamed up to create a superhero ensemble for The Avengers (2012), yet somehow managed to jam themselves into the same old formula. I sat through these films—sometimes multiple times—because in their teen years my kids loved them and sharing their loves has always been a joy. But I also reconnected with some ensemble films of the 1970s and sought out their progeny among us now. Having spent so much of my life revering film directors as auteurs, it was refreshing to reconsider films as acts of co-creation and comforting, especially after pandemic lockdown, to watch them with other people. I still love going to theatres and congregating in front of the silver screen, even if it isn’t silver anymore and even if most folks watch elsewhere, on their phone and at random times, accompanied by a dozen distractions.

Jan Stuart’s The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, is largely a record of the many ways the cast and crew—through improvisation, song composition, dialogue writing, personal experience, and sense of character and story—were as critical to the finished piece as Joan Tewkesbury’s script and Altman’s vision, his ruthless guardianship of it, and his assured and intuitive decision-making. The creative contributions of the actors can be felt in our ready attachment to their characters’ desires and disappointments and in the way the film operates simultaneously as tapestry and discrete moments of mostly failed connection (an exception, Lili Tomlin’s Linnea listening as her child, Jimmy, signs her a story about his swim class, stands as unforgettable ballast).

It’s one thing to be the main creative force behind a movie and welcome input, and another to cultivate an ethic of collective creation as one’s manifesto. For Mike Leigh, a filmmaker whose most notorious characteristic as an auteur is his collaborative method of story making, improvisation is a key component, as are the contributions of his crew at every level of the work.

On a Mike Leigh production there is a fluid lateral movement among disciplines: the improvising actor is to varying degrees a writer; the costumer works earlier and more intensively with actors and production designers than is customary; cinematographer (usually Dick Pope, who died last year) and director consider the role of light in the story as it’s developing, long before there is a completed script. The production schedule accounts for months of this type of preparation, which includes improvisations that sometimes last entire days and depend on actors having limited information about other characters and even sometimes about the nature of their own role in the film. There is no storyboard so that the camera is free to respond to actors in the moment. Meeting one-on-one with each actor to seek their character in a composite inspired by real people they have known, Leigh enlists them in a generative process that precedes and influences a script that isn’t finalized until shortly before shooting begins.

The practitioners of communal, synergistic ways of working—more common in the theatre, where most if not all the directors mentioned here began their careers—model a way of creating that has been applied to creative ownership and profit distribution as well. Girls Town (1996), directed by Jim McKay and written by McKay in conjunction with actors Denise Casano, Anna Grace, Bruklin Harris, and Lili Taylor, credited as co-writers, evolved in a series of improvisation workshops in which the actors elaborated the story of a group of high school girls jolted by the rape and then suicide of a friend. As they work on their school paper, walk through their town, and travel from grief to anger and retribution, McKay frequently frames them four abreast or in compositions that give them equal visual weight.

In a similar vein, writer-director Lynn Shelton habitually connected with actors before there was a script, exploring backstory and narrative through interactions over time, and often encouraging improvisation on set. Shelton’s films—Hump Day (2009), Your Sister’s Sister (2011), Touchy Feely (2013), Sword of Trust (2019)—escalate in emotional intensity but refuse climax and resolution in favor of awkward human mess—they are carrier-bag stories.

In a time when billionaires are sucking the lifeblood from the body politic to an unprecedented degree, collectively made and financed art is fortifying. In the performing arts, people have attempted to shift the balance of power and profit since the late 19^th century, when the first stage unions formed. In 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith founded United Artists to claim creative and financial control of their work, and in 1933, the Screen Actors Guild was born. More recently, figures like Cinetic Media founder John Sloss and Mark and Jay Duplass have worked to make more backend profits available to people working in the film industry. Mark Duplass has been vocal about the importance of building a team of creative collaborators, the poverty of the auteur model, being prolific rather than precious, working with small budgets, and sharing equity—principles he refers to as creative communism.

And there’s the recent Sing Sing (2024), whose makers, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, devised the parity equity structure they used for it and the film that preceded it, Jockey (2021), on the principle that everyone involved in their productions has, as they put it, “the same intrinsic value.” This means that all participants—92 in the case of Sing Sing—were compensated at the same SAG minimum daily rate. Total payment for the production phase varied per person based on time spent on the project. When a distributor picked up the film—in this case A24—all 92 people were paid their share. As profits continue to come in (this film cost less than $2 million to make, which helps), again, that profit was/is/will be distributed to everyone based on the agreed-upon arrangement. A structure like this means that people who typically get no backend equity in films—production assistants, sound engineers, gaffers—collectively own the movie. Kwedar says, “When something belongs to you, you take better care of it.” Anyone involved in a worker-owned co-op will confirm that.

Ensemble narratives and collective approaches to production, with the relief they offer from the restrictive structure of the hero’s journey and its echo in auteurism, manifest a kind of egalitarianism. Just as we need the durational in this time of tweets and bytes, we need stories that restore our feeling for the collective as a countervailing force against the primacy of the reel, the selfie, and a ruling class that believes the first person in chief and his friends among the one percent are the only ones who matter.