Art making and the objective world

Recently a friend of mine asked me, maybe motivated by my personal engagement in professional filmmaking and vivid interest in the arts, how a great filmmaker could be defined.

In response, I told him that we could potentially define a great director by the context of his/her artistic and technical knowledge, the ability to gently converge all the creative contributions brought by the film crew, and for the energy of kindly leading a pool of talented people meticulously stimulating each one of them along their creative work. And, after all the previous skills, a great director should also be determined in following rigid production plans responding to tight budgets and deadlines.

However, as fundamental as the stated elements are, there is a flagrant need to add to the equation the sweet and precise mystery of artistic sensibility, the choice of form by the creator, and the consequent projection of the artwork on the objective world.

The arts

Therefore, by the moment the artwork initiates its existence in concrete reality, the public potentially benefits from it, with individuals returning to their subjective particular worlds motivated by this magical encounter, recreating meanings and reinventing the dimension of the artwork itself.

In the arts, the audience is invited to become proactive when decoding the message, with all the freedom to come up with new meanings when in contact with the artwork. This simple fact may explain why some people leave art movie theatres with different understandings of the film which they have just watched, therefore motivating vibrant post-film conversations (and probably stimulating the desire to watch the art film again, each time noticing new elements in which they did not have perceived or imagined before).

Within this perspective, the arts stimulate and have the capacity to strengthen the individual in relation to the objective world. This is the revolutionary and libertarian side of the arts!