What is Creativity?

Taken from Media Magazine blog.

One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). an interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

A great shared site for creative random art with some effort is on Flickr with the shared CD meme pool. This is a game where you create a CD cover for an imaginary band and upload it to Flickr; the trick is you have to create it from 'found' materials, again following a set of rules.


The key question to consider is: how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?


Ideas and theories to help you.


"A process needed for problem solving...not a special gift enjoyed by a few but a common ability possessed by most people" (Jones 1993)


"The making of the new and the re arranging of the old" (Bentley 1997)


"Creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation." (Csikszentmihalyi 1996)


"There is no absolute judgement [on creativity] All judgements are comparisons of one thing with another." (Donald Larning)

Ennio Morricone

Biography
Born November 10, 1928, he is an italian composer and conductor. He is considered one of the most prolific and influential film composers of his era. Morricone has composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and TV productions.

Westerns and Spaghetti Westerns

Western
Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West. Some Westerns are set as early as 1836 but most are set between the end of the American Civil War (1865). There are also a number of films about Western-type characters in contemporary settings. Westerns often portray how primitive and obsolete ways of life confronted modern technological or social changes. This may be depicted by showing conflict between natives and settlers or U.S Cavalry or between cattle ranchers and farmers. American Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s emphasize the values of honor and sacrifice. Westerns from the 1960s and 1970s often have a more pessimistic view. Despite being tightly associated with a specific time and place in American history, these themes have allowed Westerns to be produced and enjoyed across the world.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada - 21 century.


Spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most were produced and directed by Italians, usually in co-production with a Spanish partner and in some cases a German partner. The partners would insist some of their stars be cast in the film.

The movie that qualifies as the first spaghetti western, Tierra brutal (1961)

Blaxploitation

Explanation

A film genre that emerged in the United States when many exploitation films were made specifically (and perhaps exclusively) for an audience of urban black people. Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.. These films starred primarily black actors. These films were accused of stereotyping blacks—their target audience—as pimps and drug dealers.

Examples

1975

• Black Shampoo
• The Black Gestapo
• Boss Niger

Post 1970

• Original Gangstas
• Jackie Brown
• Black Dynamite

Music in IB

Tarantino originally wanted Ennio Morricone to compose the soundtrack for the film. Morricone was unable to, because the sped-up production schedule of the film conflicted with his own work. However, Tarantino did use eight tracks composed by Morricone in the film, with four of them included on the CD.

The opening theme is taken from the folk ballad "The Green Leaves of Summer", which was composed by Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster. The soundtrack uses a variety of music genres, including spaghetti western, R&B. This is the first of Tarantino's soundtracks that does not include dialogue excerpts from the film. The soundtrack was released on August 18, 2009.

1. "The Green Leaves of Summer" - Nick Perito
2. "The Verdict (La Condanna)" - Ennio Morricone
3. "White Lightning" - Charles Bernstein
4. "Slaughter" - Billy Preston
5. "The Surrender" - Ennio Morricone
6. "One Sliver Dollar" - Gianni Ferrio
7. "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" - Zarah Leander
8. "The Man with the Big Sombrero" - Samantha Shelton & Michael Andrew
9. "Ich wollt, ich wär ein Huhn" - Lilian Harvey & Willy Fritsch
10. "Main Theme from Dark of the Sun" - Jacques Loussier
11. "Cat People" - David Bowie
12. "Tiger Tank" - Lalo Schifrin
13. "Un Amico" - Ennio Morricone
14. "Rabbia e Tarantella" - Ennio Morroicone

Inglourious Basterds Reviews

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inglourious_basterds/\

BBC NEWS

By Emma Jones BBC News reporter in Cannes

Quentin Tarantino has made an eye-catching return to the Cannes Film Festival with Inglourious Basterds, an epic World War II movie set in Nazi-occupied France.

Tarantino swaps fact for pulp fiction in Inglourious Basterds, a comic revenge fantasy about Jewish freedom fighters bringing down the Nazis in 1944.

Brad Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of a gang of Jewish-American soldiers operating in occupied France whose self-proclaimed mission is "to kill as many Nazis as possible".

They succeed in Tarantino's usual grisly-comic fashion, carving swastikas into the foreheads of any German soldier they do not scalp.

The plot culminates with an attempt to incinerate the Nazi high command - including Hitler, Goebbels and Goering - at a film premiere in Paris.

It's western meets war movie, with David Bowie on the soundtrack

In the words of Tarantino, it's "the power of cinema bringing down the Third Reich".

Once again, the US director has blurred film genres. Essentially it's western meets war movie, with David Bowie on the soundtrack.

And it becomes positively camp-operatic in parts - particularly in its portrayal of a shrill, semi-hysterical Adolf Hitler and British generals who could have been lifted from 'Allo, 'Allo.

Pitt may get top billing, but he's not the star of the show.

That honour goes to Christoph Waltz, an Austrian TV star who plays SS officer Colonel Hans Landa.

Comedic menace

So important was this character to the film, says Tarantino, that he considered scrapping the movie if he couldn't find the perfect actor to play him.

Waltz carries off comedic menace with aplomb in a performance that makes him a strong contender for this year's best actor prize

The film runs almost three hours and has a large international cast

This is not an American movie. Rather, it's Tarantino's homage to the European cinema he adores.

Indeed, there are so many scenes shot in French and German that an English-speaking audience will spend a lot of the film reading subtitles.

Some will wish there were a few more, just so they can understand Pitt's Tennessee-born, almost incomprehensible character.

Inglourious Basterds clocks in at nearly three hours, and its director could certainly have trimmed more of its flab.

This, and Pitt's character not getting the screen time he deserves, are the main disappointments.

It still can't touch Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme D'Or in 1994, but the reaction here at Cannes is that Quentin Tarantino has made a glorious, silly, blood-spattered return.

He is royalty at this festival - and as long as you can suspend disbelief and offence, he remains the king of trashy cinema.

Filmography

Inglorious Basterds - 2009

Hell Ride - 2008

Sukiyaki Western Django - 2007

Planet Terror - 2007

Hostel Part II - 2007

Death Proof - 2007

Grindhouse - 2007

Daltry Calhoun - 2005

Sin City - 2005

Hostel - 2005

The Protector - 2005

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 - 2004

My Name Is Modesty - 2004

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 - 2003

Hero - 2002

Little Nicky - 2000

From Dusk Till Dawn 3 - 1999

From Dusk Till Dawn 2 - 1999

God Said, 'Ha' - 1998

Jackie Brown - 1997

Girl 6 - 1996

Curdled - 1995

From Dusk Till Dawn - 1995

Four Rooms - 1995

Desperado - 1995

Destiny Turns On The Radio - 1995

Natural Born Killers - 1994

Somebody To Love - 1994

Sleep With Me - 1994

Pulp Fiction - 1994

Killing Zoe - 1993

Iron Money - 1993

True Romance - 1993

Reservoir Dogs - 1992

Eddie Presley - 1992

Past Midnight - 1991

Quentin Tarantino

Mini Biography

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born March 27, 1963, he is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and occasional actor. In the early 1990s he began his career as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2003–2004), Death Proof (2007) and Inglorious Basterds (2009). His films have earned him an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA and a Palme d'Or and he has been nominated for Emmy and Grammy awards

Film Features

• Lead characters usually drive General Motors vehicles, particularly Chevrolet and Cadillac, such as Jules' 1974 Nova and Vincent's 1960s Malibu.
• Makes references to cult movies and television.
• His films usually have a shot from inside a car trunk.
• His films will often include one long, unbroken take where a character is followed around somewhere.
• Long closeup of a person's face while someone else speaks off-screen.
• Extreme violence, much of which is suggested off-screen.
• Often frames characters with doorways and shows them opening and closing doors.
• Frequently uses Spanish classical guitar for the soundtracks.
• Known for giving combacks to "forgotten" actors and/or cult actors by giving them important roles in his movies.
• Characters frequently use the phrase bingo.