Even though you don’t see this in the movie you’re watching, it’s still part of the process of making the moving you’re watching.
The story goes that Jack Kerouac taped multiple sheets of typing paper into one ridiculously long page so that he could sit at the typewriter and pound out “On the Road” without having to break his train of thought by swapping pages. The image of this process has an intangible influence on my memories of reading of the book. It feels metaphorically resonant, even if the act of doing it isn’t directly related to the story.
I think part of that resonance has to do with being a writer myself. I can’t help but always be attracted to hearing stories about how writers pursue their craft. I like hearing if they write in long hand, sitting in coffee shops, use ancient Olivettis, or scribble 1000 notecards in pencil only to shuffle the deck until a narrative structure emerges. (That last one never made sense to me, but I’m not here to judge.)
As a photographer I can’t help but be curious about how particular images were made, too. Long lens? Polarizing filter? Large format sensor…or perhaps it was actually captured with film? (Imagine that!) Insight into the artist’s process inevitably influences the way I digest his or her work, even as I try to distance myself from the artist’s process in order to absorb the spirit and substance of what he or she was trying to say.
Orson Welles called this phenomenon, “the ghost of the clapper boy”. The term may be a little sexist in contemporary terms, and certainly dated with regard to the technology, but what he’s referring to matters for all time. Welles opined that it was impossible for him to watch a movie late in his career without being conscious of the fact that just off screen had to be a crew member holding a film clapper. That’s the mechanical slate production crews use to mark the start of a scene so film editors and sound technicians can sync up moving pictures with matching audio. Welles’s self-awareness here was that he couldn’t simply watch a film on its own terms. Since a movie demanded the inevitable labor of many hands, and since he was also a highly skilled leader of crews who made movies, it was hard for him to see a movie without also perceiving the practicalities of the many hands that made it.
This can be a trap for many people working on creative projects. In these pages, I’ve certainly discussed the deceptive siren song of specialized tools. They can often enable creative efforts but they can also act as hobbling impediments for the best intentions by creating unnecessary distractions or complexity. Endless pursuit of the perfect tool with a perfected set of skills can get in the way of actually doing good work. Make something, and your skills will automatically improve simply by using them. Constant evaluation of artistic processes other people may have employed can similarly impede our ability to actually see what those artists are trying to do creatively. We can get distracted by our evaluations of how they’re doing what they’re doing, when the real point is to do the opposite.
It’s essential that creative people of all stripes make it a regular habit to critically evaluate the works of other creative people. We gain inspiration; we gain ideas; we maintain a broader cultural dialogue so that our own work doesn’t live in isolation. In so doing, it’s inevitable that we’ll wonder what kind of brush a painter used, or if a musician recorded all of her band’s song parts independently or as a group. Equally important, however, is the vitality of trying to compartmentalize the “how” from the “why” of our creative consumption. Before we evaluate mechanical processes, we need to be sure we always ask ourselves, “Does the overall work have anything to say?” Come to think of it, that’s a good question to keep in the front of mind in our own work, too.