Abstract
The purpose of this introduction is to define the idea of ‘filmic creativity’ in relation to its use in this study: as essentially an artistic/cultural process which is structured by material constraints. In this case these constraints are the institutional and aesthetic structures of the British cinema. The construction of such a definition necessarily entails an in-depth examination of the concept ‘creativity’ — how it has been conceptualised and used by various theorists — arriving at an understanding appropriate to the film-making process. Subsequently, we can proceed to examine the ways in which the concept ‘creativity’ has been used in film theory and criticism. Taken together, these separate but related discourses will form the theoretical basis for the substantive work in this study.
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Notes
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965).
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 182.
The phrase is borrowed from the seminal work by Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
Warren Steinkraus, ‘Artistic Creativity and Pain’ in M. Mitias (ed.), Creativity in Art, Religion and Culture (Amsterdam, 1985), talks about various aspects of pain associated with the creative process including the pain of making a selection from limitless material, the pain of personal exposure; of having one’s innermost feelings made transparent through the art-work, and the pain of suppressed emotion.
Coleridge is presented by Laurence Lockridge in The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), as an example of the link between the British Romantic movement and the broader discourse of nineteenth-century European philosophy, including the Idealist tradition of Hegel and Kant.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 245.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Freud and Literature’ in The Liberal Imagination (London: Mercury, 1961).
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 69.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image/Music/Text (London: Fontana, 1977).
Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
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© 1991 Duncan J. Petrie
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Petrie, D.J. (1991). Introduction. In: Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21473-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21473-0_1
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