By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Divine inspiration: how artists find it
In the Observer, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of “Monogamy” and other epigramatic studies, makes a compelling survey of artists’ ideas about “inspiration”, with examples from musicians Beth Orton, Steve Reich and Martha Wainwright, artist Cornelia Parker, poet Andrew Motion, documentary-maker Nick Broomfield, and My Summer of Love director Pawel Pawlikowski: “One thing you develop with age and experience is an intuition for a good idea: something strikes a chord with you and it resonates. At any given time I’ll have four or five ideas, usually half-baked, but I’ll juggle them around and write story outlines until one of them stands out. Inspiration is an inchoate process that cannot really be legislated.For that reason, I find that starting with some didactic theory doesn’t work. Political anger can spark you, but it rarely gets you very far. My favourite of the films I’ve made, Serbian Epics, was the result of an unanswered question dealing with a particularly complicated and ambiguous political situation, but it was a very personal film. I think it conveyed the multi-layered nature of the situation, rather than simply explaining it and thereby reducing it to something partial and limited. Filmmaking is the most annoyingly complicated and diffusive process and lots of people are involved, so it had better be a strong impulse that pushes you to do it. I’ve made films where the ideas have carried me through, and it’s like being in love. But I’ve also made films where they haven’t, and it’s more like plumbing.”
Sounds fascinating, but the link is borked.
[Ed.: it should work now.]