Do we ever talk a lot about creativity! But I have only ever seen the act of creation properly shown in one place: the 1991 French film La Belle Noiseuse, based on a short story by Balzac. Never mind the story or plot--what is really interesting is how creation is shown. In the clip I am going to put below (sadly, in a rather distorted aspect ratio) the relevant part begins around the 53 minute mark when the painter and his model first enter the studio. He completely ignores her for about seven minutes while he moves a lot of old canvases out of his field of view and digs around for some ink and usable brushes and pens. He also changes his chair, twice, and fiddles around with his desk until it is the right angle. Then, finally, he looks at the model--really looks--and asks her to sit on the stool and look at him "bien en face" right in the face. He starts sketching. When I first saw this (in a first-run French theater in Montreal) what astonished me was how awful the pens were: scratchy, hardly any ink, and then a blob. He would just scratch around randomly for a while and then plunge the image in a big wash of water mixed with ink. It all seemed totally random. His first sketch went nowhere, so he started a second one and this almost looked like something. Then he got her to move in closer and started a new sketch of just her head. After some minutes of random scratching, suddenly you see a face. When I first saw this in the theater I was truly bowled over. What we have witnessed over these twenty minutes, was an absolutely genuine depiction of how creation happens--in fits and starts and by wrestling with the materials. What amazes me is the way his pen just jumps around in an unpredictable way, scratching a nearly illegible line here, a blot there and then he rubs it with his fingers and slaps a wash over top. Somehow, a face appears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4vIprHeJpA
For some reason, Blogger won't embed. This is the complete movie, four hours long. Unfortunately it has Vietnamese subtitles and the lower half of the screen is compressed. There are excerpts from the movie that are much better image wise, but don't contain all of this sequence that I wanted to focus on. Be warned, for hours and hours you see Emmanuelle Béart nude. Still, there are worse things, I suppose.
Here is another version "edited for an experiment in life drawing" with no sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR7hCtsxG3g
Why do I think this is authentic where all the other depictions of artists creating are bogus? Because what this captures is the randomness of it, the long durations, the searching for something and you don't know what it is. Usually the depictions of creativity show someone raging against the gods, or sweating profusely, or typing REALLY fast, or doing something extreme, but they are all working hard at going somewhere. It really isn't like that. You don't know where you are going. It is mostly fumbling around until you hit on something. Just like we see here.
Incidently, a film like this, four hours long, with very long shots and very little dialogue and virtually no action, is pretty much the opposite of all current cinema.
5 comments:
"randomness".."long durations"..."searching for something and you don't know what it is." "It is mostly fumbling around until you hit on something." Wow, Bryan, Haydn must have done a lot of fumbling in the course of producing his 106 symphonies! Your take on creativity makes the music I love even more incredible.
Did Irving Stone get it right in The Agony and the Ecstasy?
I think one has to distinguish between "performance" creativity and conceptual creativity.
The artist here has years of training and experience of a certain type. So his outcome already has a very restricted range. What he is searching for is the best "photo pose' so to speak. Like a photographer just shooting hundreds of photos while telling the model to move this way and that. The photographer is using the brute force method because it is easy to do that with a camera. The artist is turning various options over mentally and discarding them so that there are fewer iterations. An experienced composer would act similarly when they have to figure out a general plan and how the material will be arranged.
Conceptual creativity I think is either very quick (verbal wit) or very prolonged (theoretical scientific insights) but occurs standing still. Often there is a reculer pour mieux sauter (lean back the better to jump forward) period where the thinker needs to discard or unlearn customary ways of thinking about a problem or facts. A composer or artist facing a stylistic crisis would fit this situation.
Just as I was hoping, this produced some interesting comments. David, Haydn was in rather a different situation. Yes, he has some really experimental symphonies and quartets (the op 33 and the Seven Words, for example). Don't ask me which symphonies! A number of the "sturm und drang" ones are quite experimental. But he had a solid base of harmonic structure to work from so he was not really seeking in the dark. Also, the demands on composers then were quite different. You had to produce a lot of graceful and diverting music within established genres. Your job was not to plumb the depths of possibility. But after Romanticism and Modernism you don't any more have the option of just being diverting and graceful--you have to be innovative.
I read The Agony and the Ecstasy at least forty years ago and I don't recall it in any detail.
Maury, I think I agree!
with new kid-protection controls on the Youtube side there's probably no way Blogger will embed a link to the full length of that movie, which I recall a friend watching decades ago in college. Beart would probably be the reason.
I avoid watching movies that purport to be about the creative process or a depiction of the creative process. I don't even like to watch movies about musicians or music unless they're documentaries.
Ah, right! But I have run across a lot of completely non-controversial clips that also wouldn't embed...
I am of the same mind; I really hate most movies about music. Who wants to watch some actor chewing the scenery in a Beethoven bio? I think Amadeus is an exception because it handles the music and the characterization quite well. And this movie is another exception in that it is not playing off a famous name. It is not "The Struggles of Picasso" or anything. But it spends hours, literally, in that studio with the artist and the model.
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