and relied upon by others. If, by attributing authorship to one person, it implicitly attributes creativity to just one person, it is causing harm. This “harm” manifests in quantifiable ways such as wages and prestigious invitations. Calling a film “a Scorsese film” for example, has the effect over time of securing more money and visibility to him than the editor with whom he works so consistently, Thelma Schoonmaker. But the “harm” also operates in less quantifiable social and cultural spheres. Reinforcing ideas of sole authorship in filmmaking reinforces, we argue, misapprehensions about creative process. This may impede development of better methods of creating and collaborating. Adding “et al.” implies what we try to demonstrate here: that filmmaking creativity is distributed creativity, and if acknowledged as such is a rich source of film’s public value.
So, this essay is essential preliminary work to ground a future case for an “et al.” approach to authorship, with its institutional ramifications. In this chapter we focus primarily on creativity, on the complex processes and resources involved in making novel, surprising, and valuable films (Boden 2010). While directors are not sole creators, it is not necessary to take anything away from recognition of directors as creative artists. Rather we can add a more informed, empirically demonstrable understanding of the generation of ideas in the distributed cognitive systems in which films are made.
Film-Directing—A First-Person Account
We begin with images (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). We ask what different people and different things actually do on a film set to create those images, and what kinds of agency their different roles allow them in shaping the eventual outcome, the film. We use this firsthand account of a director’s experience to provide empirical evidence of significant creative actions and decision making being authoritatively executed by different “departments” of a standard film crew, even as the director retains and authoritatively executes the creative responsibilities of her role.
Figure 4.1 Esfir Shub (as played by Victoria Haralabidou) and her assistant (Violette Ayad) in a frame from “Reel 2” of I want to make a film about women. (Pearlman et al. 2020
Figure 4.2 Varvara Stepanova (as played by Inga Romantsova) and Esfir Shub (as played by Victoria Haralabidou) in a frame from “Reel 2” of I want to make a film about women. (Pearlman et al. 2020
These images are frames of I want to make a film about women (Pearlman et al. 2020), a short speculative documentary about Russian Constructivist women. The director, Karen Pearlman, is one of the co-authors of this chapter. Switching to the first person, as I do in the film itself, let me re-phrase: I directed this film. I “directed” this scene, and these images. But I did not create them. The creation, the “making” part of filmmaking, I can say from firsthand experience, is distributed. Some of this creativity is hidden but much of it is in plain sight, here in these images, and deserves a closer look.
I begin with design. Designers are responsible for everything you see in the image except for the performance and the light. Take away design, and you have naked women in a lit studio. Well, actually you probably do not, since the women would not show up for work under those circumstances. Take away design, and you have light in a studio and actors on strike. The actors are not just angry because they do not have clothes. Take away design, and you take away their key co-creators of character. Actors create action in space, and designers create space for action. The director, in a physical, material, actual sense, creates neither. She gives direction. Not instruction, direction.
The direction that I gave to the production designer Valentina Iastrebova, through a series of conversations, was to research, synthesise, imagine and create an image of the home filmmaking studio1 of Russian constructivist filmmaker Esfir Shub. I provided the antique film editing gear, which I had sourced for another film, and the designer did the rest. For example: the images on the wall behind the characters (see Figure 4.1). Close examination reveals a series of frame grabs from films by Esfir Shub and her colleague Dziga Vertov. To the right of these stills is a portrait of a person who looks like Shub’s friend Sergei Eisenstein, but is in fact actor Tug Dumbly, who is playing Eisenstein in this film (Vertov and Eisenstein both appear as characters in “Reel 3”). The costumes hanging on the left side of the wall (designed by Valentina Serebrinnikova, inspired by Varvara Stepanova, see Figure Figure 4.2), will be worn by dancers in “Reel 5.” Placing the frame grabs, the portrait and the costumes into the set was an idea generated and executed by the production designer. Although she was briefed and directed by me to make this kind of thing possible (because these kinds of things may well have been in the workshop of the character), it would be wrong to say that “director Karen Pearlman uses techniques of mise-en-scène to foreshadow events and create character.” I did not even think of these ideas for the integration of plot and character’s space, let alone make them.2
Similarly with actors. Their performances, their gestures, postures, attitudes, and actions arise from their research, their immersion in the character’s world, wearing of the character’s clothes. The actor Victoria Haralabidou, playing Esfir Shub, asked the designers for pencils, notebooks, and the scissors on a string around her neck that her character would have worn. Haralabidou’s performance decisions are creative responses to her own knowledge of the character,3 direction, script, context, space, and other actors. Cate Blanchett puts this well: “…thinking the director is going to tell you what to do—that’s a cliché. It is not the director’s job to connect the dots for you. The director makes a proposition and you complete the sentence—that’s the actor’s job” (italics in original, Blanchett as quoted in Blake 2011).
The director did not, in fact, “make” anything that is visible in these images. Not the design or the performances. Not the light, which comes from the 12 or so light sources the cinematographer has directed the gaffer, best boy, and camera assistants to arrange.4 The director also does not “make” anything that will eventually be heard in the film. The sound designers, the composer, and musicians will never even be on set, but they will “make” the film by making its sound world and score.
In the end, the director, often referred to as the creator of the film, does not really “make” anything except decisions. Decisions about offers made to them by other creative people in the filmmaking team, decisions about what “direction” to lead in. The director’s role on the crew is to be the central node of coordination. This is a vital role, of course, implemented in many different ways by different directors in different contexts: the director develops a capacity for situated anticipation, navigating or weaving a path-dependent trajectory through tangled fields of affordances (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; van Dijk and Rietveld 2018). As the director, I talk to every other member of the key crew (they talk to/direct the members of their own departments). I am responsible, for example, for making sure that the sound design, done months after the shoot, is “coordinated” with the image design, because the sound designer and the production designer will never meet. I do not literally make sounds or images; I make sure they all cohere with each other and move in the same direction.
Making good decisions and skilfully giving direction are undeniably significant and absolutely vital to the realisation of a coherent film. But the fact that directors make decisions and are ultimately held to account for all decisions made, has rarely been overlooked or undervalued. Cultural evaluation of the significance of film directors is robust. But what has it eclipsed? Is the director’s work of decision making valorized at the expense of the work of hands in literally “making” the film? In other words, is the word “labor” at the center of the word “collaboration”
