Teaching Creativity: A Practical Guide for Training Filmmakers, Screenwriters, and Cinema Studies Students

a bit of history may be instructive before we address the major question of this essay: can creativity be taught? "From time immemorial, the gift of creativity has been venerated almost as if it were divine" (Burt 13). And in fact, to the ancient Greeks, it was treated as divine, with various gods being assigned to certain forms of creativeness: "Prometheus, the discoverer of fire; Vulcan, the first of the smiths; Hermes, the inventor of writing; Aesculapius, the founder of the most ancient school of medicine—all [were] welcomed into the classical Pantheon" (Burt 13). In the Middle Ages, the leading scientists and artists were often suspected of being devils rather than deities. These prodigies were thought by many to be endowed, one way or another, with superhuman powers and abilities; indeed, cynics such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso suggested that creative "geniuses" were "unbalanced pathological freaks" who suffered from "a hypertrophied cerebrum" (quoted in Burt 13).

Later, Sir Francis Galton used pseudo-scientific methods, such as collecting pedigrees and measuring abilities and statistics, to postulate that genius was based on "an exceptionally high degree" of "general intelligence" (quoted in Burt 14), which would, of course, conflict with the in-house wisdom at one prominent film school (FSU) that "the smarter kids aren't as creative." Furthermore, like Plato, Galton believed that the best way to manufacture creative geniuses was to breed them, like racehorses.

Of course, later in life, Galton began to give equal credit to other qualities besides native intelligence, attributes such as (1) "fluency," defined as "an unusual and spontaneous flow of images," (2) "receptivity" and "insight," which are akin to what William James called "sagacity," and (3) the motivational ingredient, "zeal," the passion and enthusiasm that keep the artist up all night to solve artistic problems (quoted in Burt 14). And naturally, one has to be able to distinguish between the useful musings of the true genius and the useless fancies of the pseudo-artist—a distinction that most film professors have to make on a daily basis, especially around grading time! Indeed, it must be remembered that thinking divergent from the norm is not necessarily creative thinking. (Most film-media professors have seen their fair share of student work that breaks "the rules of the game" but is incomprehensible and appalling.) The trick, as Jean Cocteau put it, "is knowing how far you can go without going too far" (quoted in Crosland 28), by creating a personal idiom or aesthetic, an "individual code that deviates from the conventional rules" (Koestler 380) but that has some relation to the human condition and all its fixed formulas, codes, and clichés.

Needless to say, these ideas about innovation have been challenged and debated over the years, especially in America, where the democratic ideal is that "all [people] are created equal" and where, in today's academy, the "cult of great men" is debunked in most artistic and humanities disciplines (cf. Spencer 217; Buckle 566). Especially in these egalitarian "politically correct" times, how can we claim that genius or creativity is born and not made, particularly to a millennial student body? Another argument, which has been made repeatedly over the years, is that it is not the solitary artist but the zeitgeist that is ultimately responsible for the creative output of a given era. (As it was once phrased, did Napoleon make history, or did history make Napoleon?) Of course, most film students do not want to hear that they are mere "vessels" or "antennae" for the culture, or "mirrors" of their society and historical epoch, especially after they read about auteur theory, which valorizes the "personality" and "signature" of the lone original film artist (Truffaut; Sarris; Wollen).

Even if it is true that creativity is the province of "special" individuals, probably many gifted individuals do not bring their genetic gifts to full fruition, so how can we, as educators, plant, nurture, and cultivate those inherited "seedlings"? And how do we detect those creative individuals, either through our admission standards and policies or once they...