cinema – Two on Trail

In today’s day and age, we are often found grappling with information overload. How often have you thought “My brain needs to shut down for a while. I can’t take this anymore.”? People who are into creative work often feel stressed by the lack of ideas, the “block”.

A writer sits down to compile a report and feels bogged down by the research needed to put together a reasonable-length article. An artist stares at a blank canvas waiting for a creative spark. For me, I get swamped by the open-access research papers released every day. People are working rapidly and creating ideas but at the current rate it feels impossible for an individual to sift through all of it, internalize it and be able to recall it when needed in the future. In my area of research, it would be fair to say an arXiv.cs.CV paper from May 2019 would be considered stale knowledge today. For those who might not know what arXiv is, it is an open-access archive in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields. It is a system of distribution which promotes rapid dissemination of ideas compared to the traditional journal peer-review system. To give you some numbers, there are 63 new entries in cs.CV today which is a sub-sub-category.

For someone without any strategies, he/she has to sift through 63 titles today and decide which might be relevant to his/her interests – maybe 5? Then read and understand 5 of them, but distill the most useful ideas – maybe 1 paper? But doing that every day for 5 years of your PhD? That’s a strategy bound to fail. Fortunately, people have been actively thinking about these problems and some solutions which provide you with basic strategies exist.

Now what about your own approach. Every day I try to navigate in this potpourri of information, I try to think of better strategies to control the information flow and calm your brain down. Last week, I listened to the The Building a Second Brain Podcast from hosts Tiago Forte and David Perell which talks about 10 strategies to save your ideas, organize your learning, and dramatically expand your creative output with digital note-taking. Because I connected with the ideas in this podcast, I thought of adding a bit of my own experiences into the mix and write about it. In each article I will try to summarize one strategy. I hope some of these come in handy in your work spheres.

Borrowed Creativity

We are taught in school – every assignment, homework and answer must be original. Copying from others is not permitted. But borrowing is notably different from plagiarism. Creativity doesn’t come out of nothing. Before starting creative work, it is beneficial to spend a lot of time gathering and noting down your ideas and the ideas of others. The creative flow comes easily when you are surrounded by all these ideas and you start organizing, collecting and distilling them into your own words.

“Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.” says Kirby Ferguson in his TED Talk.

Examples of borrowed creativity exist in all forms of art.

Ferguson talks about Bob Dylan borrowing his melodies and lines from folk songs.

As the Nobel Prize winning poet T. S. Eliot wrote in one of this essays “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

But you might be wondering – won’t I be called out for stealing? The lesson here is that to be a thief you can’t ignore the part “make it into something better, or at least something different.” or as once someone said “the height of originality is skill in concealing origins”.

Allow me draw an example from film here.

The Odessa Steps sequence is one of the easily recognizable sequences in film. It’s first on-screen portrayal was by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin which portrays an incident from the First Russian Revolution. A hair-raising part of that sequence involves a baby in a stroller falling down the steps.

And this is a stairway scene from the 1987 crime drama The Untouchables directed by Brian de Palma (director of Scarface starring Al Pacino, Mission: Impossible among others.)

Do you think this is stealing? Or borrowed creativity? Both are revered pieces of filmmaking. Let me know in your comments.

The Auspices of the Court

In this world of copyrights and patents, there also exists a feeling of protecting what we think is ours. Steve Jobs famously said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Fast forward a few years to 2010 when Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

In the modern world where protecting one’s ideas is backed by law – not what the core guiding principle of the law was (US Patent Act of 1970 calls itself – “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts”) – it might seem a measure to stymie creativity. We must not stop borrowing but get better at doing something different with what inspires us.

References:

The new year eve of 2007. It was the age when we did not have a computer at home and my father, ever excited to watch and make me watch the well known classics of his time, used to get a DVD player from a store that rented out DVD players and DVDs. I loved every film that he ever suggested and this time it was the 1965 American musical drama The Sound of Music. I was in the seventh standard when I watched it and I was absolutely mesmerized.

I kept suggesting more of the same movie to all of my friends in the following years and even made them watch it with me. I believe I made five of my friends watch it; which means I re-watched the film five times after the one first time. I had a stupid notion that I was destined to watch the film five times so that I could appreciate it five times over, much as a justification to the five Academy Awards that it had won. I managed to break that stupid belief when I made Aniruddha watch it in a small hotel room in Patna on the laptop.

I do not know whether the film impacted my friends or even Aniruddha as much as it did to me at that age. Later in 2009, I confessed to my father that I actually fantasize that I am in the green meadows amidst the Alps with Maria (the protagonist of the movie played by Julie Andrews), playing and singing around with her. I imagined I was one of the Von Trapp family kids. I believe the impact of the watch was so strong, that I used to play the tape that my father had mixed, of all the songs of the musical, about once everyday until I knew all the songs by heart. However, after the confession, I was not encouraged to play the mix tape at home anymore. I believe I was building a parallel universe in my head and that was not allowing me to focus on my current surroundings. I recovered from the fantasizing syndrome soon enough and in 2010, after I cleared my ICSE Board exams, my father gifted me the DVD of the film. I remember, I actually smuggled that same DVD in my bag later in 2016 when I wanted to screen the film for Aniruddha when he came to visit me in Patna for five days after four months of staying away.

Yes! Life was hard with all the travelling that we had to do back then just to be with each other for a couple of days. The distance relationship brought installments of love and surprise to our lives for about six years, until 2017. Things changed in 2018, a year after we moved in US. 2018 was the year when we got to be in one city and one school. 2018 was the year I realized the purity of this song, ‘Something Good’ from my most loved musical drama.

I attach the lyrics of the song below:

Maria:
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood
Perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past
There must have been a moment of truth

For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good

Captain:
For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should

Maria:
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good

Maria and the Captain:
Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could

Maria:
So somewhere in my youth
Captain:
Or childhood
Maria:
I must have done something . . .
Maria and the Captain:
Something good

Our Journey

Tag: cinema

Borrowed Creativity

Borrowed Creativity

The Auspices of the Court

Something Good