Filming Elia Kazan's "Wild River"--Tennessee 3 Possibly 1959

This is Robert Frank's "Filming Elia Kazan's 'Wild River'--Tennessee 3," a contact sheet, which I guess makes it a kind of drawing, made during the production of the film. Now, what catches my eye here is the film strip, complete with the sprocket holes and notes. Frank isn't just showing us the image; he's showing us the process, the editing, the raw material of filmmaking. There's something about the unedited nature of it all. It's like looking at a painter's palette, seeing all the colors they considered, the experiments, the near misses. I always respond to the traces of the hand, the record of the artist's decisions. It reminds me of how, in painting, you sometimes leave the underpainting visible, a ghostly echo of what came before. It's a conversation across time, between the artist and the work, between one artist and another. Like life, art's not about clean lines, but about embracing the messy, the unresolved.