TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "collaboration"
Spitballing Indy: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the creation of Indiana Jones
[O]ver several days in 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan worked through an idea Lucas had for a film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and they recorded the sessions. And there’s a transcript. And it’s online.
…
As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”
“I like that,” Spielberg says. “The doctor with the bullwhip.”
Exquisite Corpse by Andre Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy, ca 1927
One of the oldest Surrealist games is Exquisite Corpse. Fold the piece of paper into thirds (or as many sections as there are palyers). The first player draws a head and neck in the top section, extending the lines of the neck just below the fold, then folds it over and passes it to the next player, who continues the drawing without looking at what the previous player has drawn. The second player draws the torso, also extending the lines just below the fold, then passes it to the third player who draws the legs and feet. The final product is called the exquisite corpse. This game can also be played using collage instead of drawing, and online at Draw and Fold Over. Note: you don’t have to draw people! Your section of the picture can be anything you like, as long as it connects to the lines left for you by the previous player. For more information and ideas, visit ExquisiteCorpse.com
Devised Theater: A Venn Diagram
The co-producing artistic directors of Rude Mechs, an Austin, Texas, theater group, made a diagram to depict the complexity of creating and crediting collaboratively devised work. I wrote a story about them.
This is a book about the work involved in making movies… I’ll try to tell you best I can how movies are made. It’s a complex technical and emotional process. It’s art. It’s commerce. It’s heartbreaking and it’s fun. It’s a great way to live.
The first sentence in Lumet’s bio actually made me gasp: “Sidney Lumet’s films have received more than fifty Academy Award nominations.” Fifty. And he made fifty years worth of movies: 12 Angry Men came out in 1957, and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead came out in 2007. What was his secret?
I don’t think art changes anything… I do it because I like it and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.
Lumet was opposed to the concept of “the auteur”—he was very much more what Terry Gilliam calls “a filteur.” He chose material and movies to make that he could make personally interesting to him, but he always emphasized filmmaking as a collaboration. “If all this sounds like hard work,” he said, “Let me assure you that it is.”
There are so many good bits in this book:
- “All good work requires self-revelation”
- “I don’t want life reproduced up there on the screen. I want life created.”
- “What we’re doing matters. It needs concentration.”
- “We’re not out for consensus here. We’re out for communication.”
My favorites, which translate well to other art forms:
“What the movie is about [should] determine how it is to be made.
“Discussions of style as something totally detached from the content of the movie drive me mad.” I’m a big fan of the “don’t worry about style” school, believing that style emerges out of the things you’re obsessed by. Lumet put it perfectly:
The question “What is this movie about?” will be asked over and over again throughout the book. For now, suffice it to say that the theme (the what of the movie) is going to determine the style (the how of the movie.) […] I work from the inside out. What the movie is about will determine how it will be cast, how it will look, how it will be edited, how it will be musically scored, how it will be mixed, how the titles will look, and, with a good studio, how it will be released.
But what of what Lumet calls, “The ‘auteur’ nonsense?”
So-and-so’s “style” is present in all his pictures. Of course it is. He directed them. One of the reasons Hitchcock was so deservedly adored was that his personal style was strongly felt in every picture. But it’s important to realize why: He always essentially made the same picture. The stories weren’t the same, but the genre was…
“Creative work is very hard, and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”
The truth is that nobody knows that that magic combination is that produces a first-rate piece of work… all we can do is prepare the groundwork that allows for the “lucky accidents” that make a first-rate movie happen.
But the self-deception has to be a balanced kind:
I think most of us feel like fakes. At some point “they” will get onto us and expose us for what we are: know-nothings, hustlers, and charlatans. It’s not a totally destructive feeling. It tends to keep us honest. The other side of that coin, though, the feeling that we own the work, that is exists only because of us, that we are the vessel through which some divine message is being passed, is lunacy.
Don’t let today’s work hurt the way you evaluate yesterday’s work.
[You] have to watch your inner state very carefully as you come into rushes. Perhaps today’s shooting hasn’t gone very well. You’re tired and frustrated. So you take it out on yesterday’s work, which you’re watching now. Or perhaps you’ve overcome a major problem today, so in an exultant mood, you’re giving yesterday’s work too much credit.
If you have even a sliver of interest in how movies are (or were) made, this is a must-read.
Loved this. Cory Doctorow probably said it best in his review: “I could made good case for calling this How Art Works or even How Everything Works.” Much of the book reminded me of Byrne’s frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, as you can see in my bits of marginalia above.
Some thoughts:
All art is a result of context.
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and “Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context.”
How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works—if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish—but what it is…
Context largely determines what it written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. That doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it’s actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen… This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180 [degrees] from this model. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.
And:
The implication is that great work should, if it is truly great, not be of its time or place. We should not be aware of how, why or when it was conceived, received, marketed, or sold. It floats free of this mundane world, transcendent and ethereal.
This is absolute nonsense. Few of the works we now think of as “timeless” were originally thought of that way…
All art is a collaboration.
Even in solitude, we collaborate with our influences and with our selves:
When we write, we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters, different parts of our brains and hearts. And then, when they’ve each had their say, we mentally switch hats, step back from accessing our myriad selves, and take a more distanced and critical view of what we’ve done. Don’t we always work by editing and structuring the outpouring of our many selves? Isn’t the end product the result of two or more sides of ourselves working with one another?
And ultimately, music is a collaboration between player and listener:
I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological make-up and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common.
Technology shapes art.
The microphones that recorded singers changed the way they sang and the way their instruments were played. Singers no longer had to have great lungs to be successful. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were pioneers when it came to singing “to the microphone.” They adjusted their vocal dynamics in ways that would have been unheard of earlier. It might not seem that radical now, but crooning was a new kind of singing back then. It wouldn’t have worked without a microphone.
Revealing how art works doesn’t diminish its value or magic.
Byrne speaks of one of his stage shows that he wanted to “show how everything was done and how it had been put together.” He wanted to acknowledge his influences: “I wanted to show my sources, not claim I invented everything.”
The magician would show how the trick was done and then do the trick, and my belief was that this transparency wouldn’t lessen the magic.
Amateurism is a good thing.
Genius is a kind of marketing device — modern Capitalism “tends toward the creation of passive consumers,” and that the idea that only professionals can make real music keeps amateurs from enjoying the act of making. “The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things.”
There is really no hierarchy in music—good musicians of any given style are no better or worse than good musicians of another. Players should be viewed as existing across a spectrum of styles and approaches, rather than being ranked. If you follow this reasoning to the end, then every musician is great, a virtuoso, a maestro, if only they could find the music that’s right for them, their personal slot on the spectrum.
Arts funding should be routed towards teaching students to make art, not just appreciate it.
Funding future creativity is a worthy investment. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies… Creativity is a renewable resource…
It’s more important that someone learn to make music, draw, photograph, write, or create in any form, regardless of the quality, than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol, or Bill Shakespeare.
Definitely will go in my top ten of 2012.
(Cover photo via Brain Pickings)
Great mini-interview w/ Beck and Philip Glass about their recent collaboration.
I’m interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don’t like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can’t think of. I’m the opposite of being possessive about a piece.
He illustrates this idea in a story about Arthur Russell:
I wrote him a cello piece, and he liked the work and was playing it. And I came back about three months later, and I heard it and I said, “Arthur, that’s beautiful, but what happened to the piece?” And he said, “No, no, that is what you wrote,” and I said, “Arthur, it’s no longer what I wrote, it’s your piece now.” And he thought I was being upset, he apologized and I said, “No, no, no, I think we should put you down as the composer.” He had reached the point of transformation. The incremental changes had turned it into this other thing. I love the fact that he did that. And I love the fact that he didn’t know that he did it.
Filed under: not knowing
Although I warned them I was woefully underqualified, CTV News asked me to chime in on the subject:
In Austin Kleon’s opinion, artists shouldn’t be judged solely on whether or not all of their work is produced with their own hands.
“In some sense, art is always a collaboration — an artist is always working with other artists,” the author of “How to Steal Like an Artist” wrote in an email.
He’s critical of the idea of any artist as completely independent. As an example, he pointed to films attributed to so-called auteur directors, who produced their work with the help of hundreds of people.
Expanding on the idea of art as collaboration, he added, “Whether they’re borrowing influences, or turning their back on a tradition and trying to do something completely new – either way, art is not created in a vacuum.”
And just in case I’d be mistaken for defending Damien Hirst — and oh, I assure you, I am not — here’s a sentence they left out: “If there’s something to be insulted by, it’s the quality of Hirst’s art—not who actually made it.”
