Filmmaking as creative practice: assessing creative magnitude and scale

Filmmaking as a creative practice is usually researched through film and cinema studies and screen production. Sometimes these two areas are conflated because screen production can be seen as a marginal subset of the larger body of cinema and film studies scholarly knowledge. By focusing on understandings of creativity, the foundations that have led to this scholarly relationship come into question and through an examination of theoretical and conceptual positioning of the filmmaker and the spectator this paper will offer a number of plausible reasons for this conflation. When scrutinized in this way a blind spot that has obstructed approaches to filmmaking creativity is revealed. By explaining creativity as a phenomenon that entails both film as product and film as a viewed experience, this paper will theoretically examine filmmaking as a creative practice by drawing on the seven levels of filmic reality known as the filmology, a term created by Etienne Souriau in the 1950s. Through this conceptual study, creative magnitude and scale will be used to illustrate the intimate and delicate relationship between spectatorship and filmmaking. Endorsing a systems view of creative filmmaking practice will reveal the blind spot and by clarifying the creative relationship between the filmmaker and the spectator the obscured view can be better appreciated.