Framing Robert Altman’s Nashville through Contact Sheets
This guest author post is by Justin Wyatt (University of Rhode Island), author of Robert Altman's Nashville: An Archival Exploration. The book is now available in paperback and open access.
A snapshot of American society firmly rooted in a specific time and place, director Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) presents a compelling landscape of American dreams, failures and lies. Deceptively simple, Nashville’s intricate screenplay is anchored by a tight structure juxtaposing 24 characters in the city of Nashville across five days. As a key film in the New Hollywood era, Nashville has been the focus of much textual analysis celebrating Altman’s documentary-like style, social critique and unique storytelling methods. After half a century, what’s left to say about this cornerstone of the New Hollywood? An archival exploration opens a treasure trove for those who want to engage with this cinema classic. Altman’s archive at the University of Michigan Special Collections offers evidence to unpack the film, illustrating how Altman made creative choices and, most significantly, traces of other potential version/s of Nashville.
A cinematic text does not live in a vacuum. Allied materials and artifacts, such as film stills and other cinematic images, impact how we process the film, acting as guides or filters to the primary text. The archival images illuminate aspects of Altman’s filmmaking, particularly through which characters and scenes are omitted from the final cut and how these decisions shaped the film and its design.
Many of the archived photographs are part of contact sheets. Karina Longworth offers a valuable definition of the contact sheet: “A contact sheet—also known as a proof sheet or contact print—is a printed reproduction of one or more strips of developed film, exposed at a one-to-one ratio in order to produce positive images in the same size as the frames on the negative.”1 Unlike the individual film publicity still, the contact sheet is dependent on the shot-to-shot connection. In this way, the contact sheet hews more closely to the experience of watching a scene or sequence from a film.
The Nashville contact sheets are generally set with five images across and six lines down. The effect is like the individual frames in a comic book: you read across and then down to the end of the page. Contact sheets most often convey a brief period so the images are very close in terms of composition and content to each other. The contact sheets include scenes from the completed film; behind-the-scenes shots of Altman directing and interacting with the cast and his creative personnel; and scenes that feature characters and locations in the film but have either been cut or were never included.
What can the contact sheets tell us about Altman’s design for Nashville? There are two primary takeaways, linked to transitions between scenes and to character. The contact sheets show that Altman shot several other scenes that could aid the flow between characters and their interactions, yet ultimately these were omitted from the film. Contact sheet scenes facilitate later action, setting in place a cause and effect between characters and the development of a storyline. The viewer would interpret a scene later in the film differently if Altman had chosen to include a deleted scene. One sheet shows an intimate hospital room conversation between country singer Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) and senior citizen Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn). The scene is cut from the film. Keeping the quiet moment between Mr. Green and Barbara Jean might have shaped a softer, kinder Barbara Jean who cares about an elderly stranger whose wife is sick. Similarly, Mr. Green could have spoken about his ailing wife, showing his connection and love for her. The simple scene would have definitely set up the later hallway chat between the two characters in the film and the more emotional moment when Mr. Green learns that his wife has passed. The film functions without the deleted scene from the contact sheet, but it could have bolstered a sense of continuity and a bond to the characters. With these (and other) scenes cut, there is a greater onus on the viewer to create the missing connections and to imagine a life for the characters off-screen. Altman’s approach veers from classical Hollywood storytelling in which every element is designed to signify and the viewer is led seamlessly through the film.
The contact sheets can also reveal how characters might have developed in other, sometimes startling, directions. Tellingly, Opal, the alleged BBC reporter played by Geraldine Chaplin, is the subject of one contact sheet. Among the large cast of characters, Opal received a polarized reaction, with some critics and viewers feeling that the character was simply over-the-top. In this case, the contact sheet reveals a completely different line of action. In the completed film, the harshest response to Opal might be generated by the scene of innocent Bud Hamilton (Dave Peel) singing his song ‘The Heart of a Gentle Woman.’ Sitting at a wishing well on his father’s estate, Bud plaintively sings his love song to Opal, who seems moved at first. She looks out and suddenly spots Elliott Gould. Opal abruptly leaves Bud mid-song so she can cozy up to a celebrity. The scene shows Opal to be callous to the extreme, incapable of valuing a simple human connection over an opportunity to meet a star.
The contact sheet uncovers a separate story, however. Bud and Opal are together at the wishing well and he sings to her. Lawyer Del Reese (Ned Beatty) sits down next to the pair. Bud eventually leaves Opal and Del together. They spend some time chatting and eventually both depart the wishing well. What could be happening? Bud might be called away to help his father while Del is left to escort Opal during her visit to the Haven Hamilton estate. If Altman had opted for this turn of events, Opal would have been perhaps somewhat more relatable, forming a connection with Bud rather than dumping him cruelly. Altman’s choice yields a sharper edged Opal, desperate for celebrity, while the contact sheet potentially humanizes her.
An even more dramatic contact sheet reading occurs with Pvt. Kelly (Scott Glenn) who, like many Nashville characters, hovers on the edge of the film’s action. In one revealing scene, Pvt. Kelly suddenly tells Mr. Green that he is on leave to see Barbara Jean whom his mother saved after the singer’s fire baton accident. In the finale, Pvt. Kelly wrestles the gun from Kenny although Kelly is unable to save Barbara Jean from the assassin. The ending frames Kelly as a hero, stopping Kenny (David Hayward) from continuing his rampage. In a contact sheet scene missing from the film, Kelly confronts a man at the Opry Belle stage where Barbara Jean has just performed. At first, the two talk but Kelly shoves the person and proceeds to knock him down violently. Doubled over in pain, Kelly’s adversary cannot even respond to the attack. He is left crumpled on the walkway near the stage. The crowds in the stands look on as the fight continues but no one intervenes. The contact sheet demonstrates that Pvt. Kelly can be violent and sadistic, while the film’s depiction is more favorable, offering a character who is likable and without ill intent. The contact sheet presents a polar opposite take on the character compared to the benign figure left in the film.
Entertaining such a contrary view of the character, I am indulging in speculative consumption. In Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, Jonathan Gray explains that our engagement with paratexts, materials connected but subservient to the main text, leads viewers to create ‘certain meanings and interpretations’ of the film. Gray cites elements like a poster, the marketing campaign, the source materials and a host of other paratexts. My activity of combing through the Nashville contact sheets and other ephemera does not inform an initial viewing of the film. Rather I am confounding my own interpretations of a film seen many times with additional data, considering other directions for the characters, and seeking to augment or refine my accepted vision of Nashville’s characters and world. The contact sheets revealed added dimensions to a character or facilitated transitions between scenes in a smooth manner. Of course, I am framing these deleted scenes based on the character that is present in the film. The ‘surviving’ footage takes precedence in forming an assessment of each character.
Filmmaker Rebecca Baron, whose film work is often comprised of still photography and found footage, describes her research for a project in these terms, “For me, the process is associative. I think of it as a billiard game with the ideas banking off the sidewalls, leading to unexpected trajectories.”2 My exploration of the Nashville contact sheets was based on discovering images not in the film and then attempting to reconcile them with my knowledge of Nashville’s narrative. I was playing my own billiards game to create meaning from the film. The contact sheets mostly expose elements that fit with the character on film. These images usually present additional facets to the character that paint the person in more depth. The curious examples of the Opal and Pvt. Kelly contact sheets, however, muddy our understanding of each character.
My larger investigations in the archive rarely led to a light bulb moment: finding a document that would shed new light on the creative process of filmmaking. More often my process involved looking for disjunctures or fissures between different elements in the archive. Screenplay drafts, images and memos created a tapestry of creative inputs. Interviews with key collaborators also offered another thread of information on the creative process, albeit one sometimes dulled by the space of fifty years. Rather than explain how the film came to fruition, I discovered a Nashville that might have been, an alternative direction that could have been taken.
Notes
Photos are from the University of Michigan Special Collections.
Author photo is by Leah Pisari.
1. Karina Longworth, Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997 (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 9.
2. Rebecca Baron, “The Idea of Still,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Redrobe and Jean Ma (Duke University Press, 2008): 125.
