href="#ulink_28c5877c-a717-5250-816a-297f708f3e60">16 This conception is brought out by Erich Matthes (2020) in his recent discussion of what he calls “landscape portraiture”. Matthes argues that, just as portraits of people aim to capture and express their essential character, so, too, landscape paintings may succeed in capturing the essential character of a landscape. As he puts it, “The purpose of landscape portraiture is … to reveal the dynamic and complex character of the environment through visual modes of representation” (133).17 17 Indeed, this is the case to such an extent that wildlife painting has frequently been viewed as lacking any significant artistic dimension at all, both by art critics and, sometimes, by wildlife painters themselves.
18 18 Arnheim’s remark is quoted by Lopes, who cites this as one the distinctive features of the experience of looking through photographs (2003, 443).
19 19 It’s worth noting that film represents only one instance of technology expanding the range of perceptual experience of the natural world: devices such as the microscope and the particle chamber, like high-speed cameras, offer new modes of experiencing nature that are of both scientific and aesthetic interest.
20 20 Can there be generative mediation in the case of art? Typically, experiential accuracy seems the rule here: artworks usually have specific properties that we are supposed to experience in prescribed ways. A representation that provided a new way of experiencing a given work would, it seems, simply be a different work of art. Translation, however, provides an interesting case. It is commonplace to think that we can appreciate a literary work by appreciating a translation of it. Certainly, reading an English translation is not an experientially accurate rendering of a performance of Homer’s Odyssey, to the point that we could well take the translation to be a distinct work. Yet, it seems that that we can still appreciate the original, to some extent, via the translation.
21 21 Dutesco’s photographs of the Sable Island horses, and a documentary film about his visits to the island, Chasing Wild Horses, can be seen at his website, https://dutescoart.com.
4 Reframing the Director Distributed Creativity in Filmmaking Practice
Karen Pearlman and John Sutton
Introduction
Filmmaking is one of the most complexly layered forms of artistic production. It is a deeply interactive process, socially, culturally, and technologically. Yet the bulk of popular and academic discussion of filmmaking continues to attribute creative authorship of films to directors. Texts refer to “a Scorsese film,” not a film by “Scorsese et al.” We argue that this kind of attribution of sole creative responsibility to film directors is a misapprehension of filmmaking processes, based in part on dubious individualist assumptions about creative minds. Such a misapprehension is effacing the public value that a more inclusive and accurate understanding of filmmaking offers. By “public value” we mean the potential to enhance social and cultural well-being, particularly in working lives and collaborative undertakings in the screen industries. Better understanding of the systemic and social nature of creativity in filmmaking can potentially help in democratising aesthetics, which we consider a clear public good.
By treating motion picture production as a model case of distributed creativity, we can more accurately identify the public value of filmmaking processes. We can do justice to the unique roles of highly skilled individuals and offer some insights into creative collaboration. This approach has theoretical, descriptive and normative benefits. A more robust understanding of how films are “made” serves as a model for a richer understanding of distributed creativity and cognition. By considering filmmaking as a “‘trans-corporeal’ enterprise not simply bound by the skull or the body, but as actively mediated through artifacts, tools, and social-communicative processes” (Theiner and Drain 2016, 7), we enrich understanding of collaboration. A more accurate description of the work of women that has been historically effaced by focus on individual, mostly male, directors has intrinsic social and political value. These results and insights carry clear implications for how aesthetic credit should be assigned, and demonstrate the benefits and value of gender parity.
We begin with a firsthand account of a filmmaking process by a director, working on a film about Russian constructivist filmmaker Esfir Shub (1884–1957). This is followed by discussion of ideas of creative process that this firsthand account adds to or challenges. We then offer an alternative conception of what may be occurring, starting with a broad description of distributed creativity, what it is and where it is in creative processes. Our argument for distributed creativity in filmmaking is finally made through two short case studies of editing that illustrate some of its intersections with directing. Our first draws on research done in preparation for making the film about Esfir Shub and asks why and how Shub’s innovations in film form during the influential period of innovation known as the Soviet Montage era have been side-lined compared to those of her male contemporaries. We then turn to a workshop we staged in 2019 with four film philosophers and four editors. We show that the philosophers’ reports on their experiences of directing in this workshop support a view of filmmaking creativity as distributed across the brains, bodies, and tools of collaborators who “make” the film together.
Although the link between creativity and authorship is deeply embedded in industry practice and in the public understanding of cinema, the two concepts are not equivalent. Creativity, our primary focus here, is a psychological and aesthetic concept; it is a matter of degree; making sense of it requires close attention to process. Authorship, a puzzling and imported notion in the context of film, is a legal, political, and economic concept, a matter of credit and responsibility, of marketing. It is often linked to what Dana Polan identifies as a cultural “desire” (2001) for a single artist to whom we can attribute generation of an artwork. Creativity is neither necessary nor sufficient for legal authorship: some “authors” of some films deploy and exhibit minimal or no creativity, and conversely many highly creative contributions to filmmaking are neglected or bypassed in the contexts of power and institutions where authorship is attributed.
Of course, creativity and authorship in film are connected, though not necessarily in any stable, context-independent way. We suggest that understanding creativity better will, and should, affect and liberalize attributions of authorship. In future work we will address the political elements of authorship status in film directly. One recommendation is that a simple innovation in film referencing developed by Pearlman should be widely adopted. In-text citations of films should read (Director Surname et al. YEAR), and bibliographies and lists of works cited should follow up with an IMDB link or an AFI database link to the credits for the film. We propose this in part because referencing systems that cite the director as author are unclear as to whether that citation is intended to signify legal authorship (as in who would be the respondent in a legal case concerning the film’s ideas or other things) or creative authorship (as in who has the ideas and realizes them onscreen). In either case citation of director as sole author is fallacious. The director is not the legal author of a film. The production company is the author for legal purposes. The director is also not exclusively the creative author of a film, as we will argue in the balance of this chapter. Thus, if the reference system’s citation method is intended to imply that the director is the creator of the film, adding “et al.” is not only a positive reminder that films are created in complex embodied, embedded, and enactive cognitive systems. It is also an implied question that begs readers to ask themselves who else may have been involved. Were there women, for example, who have not been foregrounded?
