Introduction
Filmmakers have carried out research through specialized filmmaking roles—these include the screenwriter (Taylor 2014), director (Berkeley 2011, 2018), cinematographer (Greenhalgh 2018), editor (Pearlman 2016), documentary filmmaker (Kerrigan 2016) and fictional filmmaker (Knudsen 2016). As creative practice researchers, these filmmakers have produced highly specialized filmmaking accounts that draw on their intuitive professional industry practices described through the lens of creative practice research. These practice research accounts contribute to the broader context of filmic creativity by revealing how a filmmaker’s processes are influenced by both external conventions and his or her own agency. Through a critical examination of these accounts, similarities, particularly in terms of embodied filmmaking practices resulting from intuitive creative processes and procedures, illustrate how the embodiment of practices can be researched.
These research findings describe how filmmakers made daily filmmaking decisions, which were both conscious and tacit, regarding how a spectator might make meaning from a yet-to-be-completed film. This awareness, of how the audience might read the film, became one of a number of factors that shaped each filmmaker’s daily decisions. When brought together and critically examined against creativity theories (Sawyer 2006; Csikszentmihalyi 1999; Boden 1990; Bastick 1982), these individual accounts corroborate research on creativity and creative filmmaking practice that describes practices as being embodied, intuitive and tacit creative experiences that are constrained and enabled by the codes and conventions of the filmmaking context and the filmmaker’s own agency.
Filmic creativity has been defined ‘as essentially an artistic/cultural process which is structured by material constraints’ (Petrie 1991, p. 1). This chapter extends these ideas to include not only the material constraints of filmmaking, which can be seen as enablers of creative action, but also the immaterial constraints, that is, the embodied codes and conventions that have been described as the rules of the domain and the opinions of the field by Csikszentmihalyi (1999). The idea that immaterial constraints can and do shape daily filmmaking or screenwriting practices is supported by creativity theories that describe embodied, tacit and intuitive understandings, whereby filmmakers absorb rules, conventions and audience expectations to the point that these contribute, often unconsciously, lead to creative practice. Sawyer argues that all persons acting within a creative field draw on a shared history of the domain, which results ‘in the body of existing works that is known and is shared knowledge among creators in the area’ (2006, p. 106).
This research corroborates the intentions of six filmmakers who describe their creative practice in similar ways. The similarities among these experiences become evident when the experiences are critically examined, and point to generic descriptions of processes, procedures and practices that shape each filmmaking context as well as the filmmaker’s ability, knowledge and skill to make decisions and their assumed understanding of their audience or spectator. As such, these professional filmmaking research accounts describe similar experiences concerning the types of decisions filmmakers face daily, which occur as a result of a deep understanding of the conventions, rules and symbols that make up this creative domain and allow for that deep engagement to become intuitive.
Kerrigan (2016) argues that the systems view of creative practice can be used to explain the actions of the filmic agent as someone who holds knowledge of both filmmaking and spectating. This framework does not favour one creative activity over another; rather it adopts a systemic understanding that allows creative individuals to draw, simultaneously, on numerous domains of embodied knowledge, allowing such knowledge and skills to co-exist as agency manifesting through practice. In this context, creative agency becomes filmic agency, which permits the deeply interconnected positions of the filmmaker and the spectator to influence decision-making through daily practice. The conclusion of this critical analysis of multiple filmic agencies reveals that a mature filmic agency is an essential component of creative practice, as it allows for the stimulation, selection and transmission of novelty.
Creative Filmmaking Practice as a System in Action
The creative system (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, p. 315) offers a large-scale perspective of how an individual contributes to the production of culture through bringing novelty into being. The novelty that is produced must comply with sets of rules and social practices that are relevant to the domain, in this case filmmaking, and be recognized by other filmmakers as valuable. Once peers identify the novelty, as they see it, in someone else’s film, then those ideas move ‘beyond their original instigator and become part of a larger paradigmatic shift in thinking. Each person who supplies confirmation of the ideas may add something new to it, thereby giving the initial idea a life of its own’ (McIntyre et al. 2016, p. 2).
This systems-based understanding of creativity was extended to create the systems view of creative practices (Kerrigan 2016, p. 127), which sees film...