2018) the work of hands and not the work of minds? Attempts to compare the film’s director to the literary notion of an “implied author” in support of the idea that a film is “the unified product of a single controlling intelligence” (Chatman 2005, 191–192, as discussed in Meskin 2008, 23) highlight the problem.5 The notion of a “single controlling intelligence” is not just a slight to the creative and intellectual work of the key crew members who actually make things—with their hands, their bodies, their voices, their tools, their teams—it is, in our view, a misapprehension of what intelligence actually is, particularly in the work of creative cognizing.
Returning now to the first-person plural, because more than one of us is needed to connect the domains of cognition and creative practice, we will argue that film “making” is the work of the brains, bodies, tools, and interactions of many creative people functioning in distributed cognitive ecologies or systems. Given the enormous cultural influence of cinema and ideas about cinema, we propose that a distributed cognition understanding of creative practice in filmmaking has public value. It has potential to enhance well-being in working lives and collaborative undertakings, particularly those involving women whose agency and creative participation may be being effaced by individualistic assumptions about the generation of creative work. Malinin (2019, 10) calls for “a new definition of creativity…needed to describe creativity as situated practice, emerging through person-environment interactions (material/technological as well as socio-cultural).” We aim to contribute to this emerging definition in such a way that it does not take away from the strengths or valuation of any individual in the filmmaking process. Rather, our more accurate account of film “making” clarifies aspects of cognition and creativity. This clarification, we propose, allows for the unrecognised work of others to be evaluated—something that certainly has public value. It promotes evaluative frameworks in film that recognize the work of people other than the white men who dominate film history thus far, and provides a model, moving forward, for enriched approaches to creative practice in film and other disciplines. We turn now to discussion of the “distributed creativity” model we are proposing.
Distributed Creativity
Creative processes do not, in general, occur wholly in the mind or brain of a single individual. Rather, they are often spread or distributed: both (sometimes) across the brains and bodies of collaborating participants, and (typically) across objects, technologies, locations, systems, and environments. We are thinking here of the central contributing cognitive, imaginative, emotional, motor, and social processes which drive creative work that turns out to be (more or less) novel, surprising, and valuable (Boden 2010). Among these processes (in no particular order) are visualizing, feeling, decision making, designing, acting and interacting, selecting, remembering, making, wondering, composing, and perceiving. Everyone engages in these activities, but they operate in many different ways and contexts. The claim that creativity is distributed, which we can make in both critical and constructive modes, is that—at least in the context of culturally-embedded art forms such as film, dance, and music—these are embodied processes stretching across specific systems or ecologies of practice. This increasingly influential distributed approach to creativity falls out of broader situated and anti-individualist movements within the cognitive sciences (Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; Barrett 2011; Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher 2018). These wider theoretical shifts depict our mental and emotional lives as always already to some extent cultural, collaborative, and creative: but they also afford rich resources for analyzing specific forms of creativity in the arts, and for working with practitioners for mutual benefit (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009; Preston 2013; van der Schyff et al. 2018; Torrance and Schumann 2019).
In a critical mode, we claim that creative cognition is not a hidden, private, inner source of decisions and actions: rather, it is a worldly, public, and emergent action or interaction. Distributed creativity can thus be framed as a critique of residual individualism in thinking about the arts, of the modernist-romantic cult of genius. Clarke and Doffman, introducing their book Distributed Creativity: collaboration and improvisation in contemporary music (2017), note that “the twenty-first century is still in thrall to an early-nineteenth-century vision of the heroic individual creator—even as the most distributed technologies of production that have ever existed increasingly come to pervade our lives and our music.” They aim “to redress the balance by bringing creativity’s hidden side—its distributed other, with all its contradictions and uncertainties—into the light” (2017, x). Riffing on David Byrne’s attack on the “romantic notion” of creativity in How Music Works (Byrne 2017), Mike Wheeler aims to reveal and then undermine the natural assumption that creative processes must start with and in the individual mind:
We can barely see the cognitive mechanisms underpinning creativity because our heads are in the way. Once this cranial obstruction is fully removed, the path of creation is revealed to be routinely constituted by dynamic arrays of body-involving and environment-involving processing loops. In other words, the creative mind is embodied, embedded and extended. (Wheeler 2018, 247)
In the case of film, the distributed framework opens up new avenues of positive inquiry into the complex ecologies of filmmaking.
In a constructive mode, then, we can examine specific ways in which the component processes of creative cognition and action are realized in unique settings. Remembering, sensing, constructing, and decision making are hybrid processes, involving not just subjective and neural but also bodily, material, and social resources. These are embodied, collaborative, worldly, and practical cognitive skills. Such heterogeneous resources, each with their own dynamics, timescales, histories, formats, and tendencies, can complement each other (Sutton 2010; Colombetti and Krueger 2015). This kind of systemic ecological view does not debunk or efface the aesthetic role of individuals in creative processes, or downplay the originality of work produced in unique cultural contexts. Because humans are thus interactive and integrative, the extent of our reliance on other people, routines, artifacts, cultural norms, and environmental support is not a deficit or weakness but ordinary interdependent distributed agency (Hutchins 2010; Sutton 2015; Harcourt 2016). In gaining skills in a particular creative domain, we rely on (social and material) scaffolding to support and anchor our learning and early practice. With developing expertise, artists become so firmly and effectively enculturated in the practices and norms of their field that they may even begin to transform or reject those norms. That is not the dismantling of all scaffolding but its transformation: even the maverick film director continues to rely on vast and uneven arrays of technological and institutional resources, and especially on other skillful practitioners working together across distinctive roles. To urge attention to these ecologies of filmmaking practice is not to erase individual creativity but to understand it better. It is not to make the director disappear but to locate her and her work more accurately within its rich networks of practical action.
Methodologically, this kind of interdisciplinary project must be a two-way street, not another imperialist takeover of film theory and aesthetics by cognitive science. On the one hand, the idea is to use these independently motivated theoretical concerns to help us see real features of filmmaking practice that might otherwise remain invisible. On the other hand, the specificity of film cultures and the diversity of on-the-ground creative practice will drive revision and further development of the framework (cf., Sutton 2009; Sutton and Tribble 2014).
There are at least three levels at which we can address distributed creativity here. First, there is the general aim of building an account of distributed creativity, in abstraction from particular art forms, but in alignment both with aesthetic theory and the cognitive sciences. Film will—at this general level of analysis—look quite different from visual art, from music, from dance and drama and performance arts, and from literature, as well as from non-artistic domains of practice. The distributed creativity framework joins other aesthetic and theoretical approaches in assisting in comparative analysis, identifying patterns in the ways creative processes emerge across and within distinctive fields.
But of course, “film” is no single domain, no unified art form:
