Does technology kill creativity?
“One of the best things Orson Welles, my friend for 15 years, ever said to me was, ‘the enemy of art is the absence of (financial or physical) limitations.’” Henry Jaglom
A couple of nights ago, we were trying to find something to watch on Netflix. I’ve never been too attracted to watching series until Netflix came along. I’d much rather watch a great old movie. But when you have to compromise with a watching companion…
Choosing something to watch on Netflix reminds me of when we would all go to Blockbuster to choose a DVD for the evening. You browse around, but most times one of you has seen a film. So you keep browsing, hoping to find something you both haven’t seen and is also acceptable to both.
So the brave new world of streaming has brought us to exactly where we were 30 years ago, except minus the trip to the high street. But the appeal of a TV series over a movie is that once chosen this will save us having to go through the painful choosing process for at least a week. So we stormed through Stranger Things, Season 3.
Then we were back hunting for something new to watch. We couldn’t find anything. “I wish they had a random button and it chose for us,” I said. “I’ll close my eyes and click at random and we have to watch whatever I land on,” she said. “Pick a number from 1-20.”
“14”
She clicked 14 times and landed on Ridley Scott’s Alien. After some groans we decided to stick with the promise and the movie started.
After some very quiet titles, with the camera panning across a very 2D looking planet, the spacecraft looms into view. It’s very reminiscent of that opening shot of Star Wars.
“When was this made?”
“1979.”
“It looks real.”
“The spaceship? Well, it is real. It’s a model. They didn’t have CGI back then.”
Later, once the creature attaches itself to the crew member’s face, we remark again at how real the creature looks. I mean, it could be an actual creature if we didn’t know it was a movie. Unlike the CGI monster from Stranger Things.
“The movie is very still,” I say. “You’d never get a sci-fi horror shot so still these days.”
The opening contains several minutes of motionless (or camera work with minimal movement) and very little action. For me, this stillness is what makes the movie so creepy. When something dramatic happens to break the silence, it’s all the more shocking.
The acting is also some of the most naturalistic in any scifi movie ever made, adding to the realism. And even though they are gazing into computer screens showing 1979-style graphics, it still feels more real than any CGI work is currently capable of. That’s because the computer screens are real and haven’t been replaced in post, as they would be today.
I know this sounds like your grandad talking about the “good old days”. But it’s really more a remark on how things have changed in the last 40 years. The entire look of Alien was designed by Swiss artist Hans Ruedi Giger. And those sets and monsters were then built (or painted). These days, the design of the film would be created by CGI artists.
But it seems that viewers are perhaps less interested in realism and more in escapism now. So it doesn’t matter if the monster is realistic, we just want it to be larger than life. Also, if you grew up with video games a monster that looks like it came from a video game is perhaps the new realism.
Anyway, it led me to wonder if there is still room for that kind of creativity in filmmaking. The challenges used to be mostly practical, rather than technological. For example, to create those very long corridors within the spaceship in the film Alien, they created a short corridor and put a mirror at the end. These days, would filmmakers simply turn to the CGI artist? Would they even bother building a spaceship set?
While I’m all for moving forward and exploring new ways of doing things, I do believe we should not forget what came before. For most of the history of cinema the technology was very simple. A camera had to run film through it at 24 frames per second. The rest of the process involved a lot of illusion creation by practical means.
Famously, the mechanical shark in Jaws didn’t work very well, so they had to rely more on the suggestion of a shark. For example, shooting from the POV of the shark underwater looking up at those human legs dangling down. Would Jaws have been as disturbing if there had been a CGI shark in every other shot?
These days, all of us have access to a huge amount of technology. We are being offered DSLR, mirrorless or more pro cameras with high image quality. A long list of lenses are on offer. Camera operators need to be experts in this digital technology, which is constantly advancing. So more of our time is used trying to keep up with the new tech, fearing we will fall behind.
But 40 years ago, a 16mm camera was basically the same as most other 16mm cameras. There wasn’t a new level of 16mm film quality being released every year. There were advances, but these were rare and didn’t happen too often. This meant once a filmmaker understood how to use a 16mm camera, there was nothing more to do other than make a good film with one.
The crude simplicity of non-digital filmmaking kit meant more time was spent being creative. Indeed, filmmakers were forced to be creative to overcome the limitations – just as Orson Welles suggested. Therefore, the less limitations there are the less creative we will be, and the more obsessed we will become with keeping up with the latest limitation-removing tech on the market.
As I say, I’m not against technology. The problem I see is when the promise to liberate us becomes a clever way to enslave us into a dependency on the latest tech update. The piece of kit you simply “must have” to keep up with the top professionals.
But in a world where everything is about profit, there’s still one thing you can’t buy: imagination. So it’s not surprising that tech companies who promise to unlock our creativity for us, aren’t in fact all that interested in it. Therefore, it is our responsibility alone to liberate our creativity and make sure we never entrust that task to profit makers.
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