the landscape in fantastical colors, carefully chosen for what he took to be their specific emotional qualities.
11 11 On the Picturesque, see Hussey (1927); for a short overview of the Claude glass, see Hunt (1994).
12 12 For a critical look at the use of photograph measurement as a way of quantifying the aesthetic value of landscapes, see Carlson (1977). A recent perspective on scenic quality assessment in general is Daniel (2001).
13 13 On the importance of considering objects as well as environments see Moore (2008, 113) and Budd (2002, 135–6).
14 14 These two issues seem, furthermore, to be connected, in the sense that the particularly immersive character of film seems to allow it to engage the imagination to a degree that other representations (e.g., photography) do not.
15 15 In his discussion of photographs, Friday sees these two issues as related: so long as the expressive element of an image does not completely divert attention from the environment it depicts, it counts as a quality of that environment, rather than something projected onto it. Such expressive qualities found in images are thus, Friday concludes, environmental, not pictorial (1999, 33). However, these are distinct issues: an image might impart an expressive quality to an landscape that has nothing whatever to do with it, while still allowing us to pay some attention to that landscape (Marc’s fantastical landscape paintings, mentioned earlier, provide an example).
16 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