Collaboration. The word rolls off the tongue — easy to say — but much harder to define. There is of course the Latin root we can look to for guidance: from ‘con’ meaning with and ‘laboro’ meaning work. Put together it would seem that collaboration simply means to ‘work with’.
In many fields where people work side by side the word collaboration is rarely used. Do surgeons and anesthetists collaborate? Even in massive creative endeavors such as building, where architects work closely with engineers and builders, their combined efforts are not referred to as collaboration; rather, they are all just doing their jobs.
But the word ‘collaboration’ is often used in the creative screen industries. So often in fact that many contributors to this issue acknowledge that the word may almost be a cliché. In the film industry, ‘collaboration’ connotes more than simply working side by side. Somewhere between a truism and a mantra, uses of the word traverse a wide spectrum from the pragmatic to the transcendent.
Sometimes the word has connotations of evil. As AFTRS Head of Screen Music, Martin Armiger, points out in his essay herein, there was nothing worse you could be called right after World War Two than a ‘collaborator’. It meant someone who had betrayed their friends, allies or country to protect themselves, or worse, to profit.
At the other end of the spectrum, creative collaboration is sometimes revered as a kind of Holy Grail, a sanctified concept. This sense of it as an underlying force for good, a truth to be upheld, is perhaps why it is hard to define. We don’t like to define things that we need to contain some mystery, some sense of the ineffable, in order to inspire us. Collaboration in this sense implies a sharing of a powerful, guiding and possibly unspoken vision. It is what Walter Murch means when he says, ‘Movies are much smarter than the people who make them.’ He is saying that, in a sense, when we forget our power struggles and egos and listen intently to the material that we are crafting together, then that material generates momentum and logic of its own.
But mostly ‘collaboration’ walks the middle road between the devil’s work and divine inspiration, and in this issue of LUMINA, we set out to explore some of the many forms it takes, ideals it implies, and difficulties it encounters. We asked what, in a practical sense, does it mean? How does it work? Who does it, when and for what reason? And in a more conceptual approach: Is it real or just an opiate that keeps people thinking they are part of the action? Is doing a creative job on a film necessarily ‘collaboration’? Or is it just doing your job?
The responses by our contributors are diverse.
Mark Cousins’ view from the perspective of historian and cinephile is that, ‘The movies are a grand collaboration between dream and reality.’ Producer Ted Hope, surveying the new forms of ‘collaboration’ between films and their audiences advises that, ‘Collaboration is work based around a common vision, but it can also benefit from a common ownership.’ Neil Peplow approaches the questions from the point of view of management theory and finds that an egocentric bias encourages people to think their contribution is worth more than others, but a simple shift in perspective allows people to recognise ‘that although their efforts are important and vital, they are part of a wider team.’
Looking at some unusual collaborations, it is evident that the tension between good and evil exists even when the processes are innovative. Greg Dolgopolov, looks primarily at documentary filmmaking, which raises some ethical issues around working together, and he marks out some useful distinctions between collaboration, cooperation and simply making a contribution. Matt Campora observes the journey Morgan Spurlock took to try to ‘collaborate’ with sponsors to raise money for his film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and finds that Spurlock ultimately, though amusingly, loses his grasp on any artistic principles and flails around in traitorous cooperation. Stephen Vagg sticks close to the Latin roots of the word collaboration and surveys a history of Australians working with each other in ongoing partnerships that sustained their energy and enhanced their outputs.
There are also a series of essays about collaborative practice, which one might expect would be fairly practical, but in fact the tug-of-war between the pragmatic and the ineffable is at its most evident here. Perhaps because they are so often on the front lines, battling to get their projects made, directors seem to be more pragmatic. Both Michael Spierig and Graham Thorburn lay out some nuts and bolts of their processes, relying on craft skills and experience to navigate between what Thorburn calls the ‘lowest common denominator compromise or survival-of-the-fittest creative domination.’ Mike Jones and Karen Pearlman look backwards a couple of centuries to the original idea of a theatrical dramaturge to find a useful model for collaboration in new and interactive media. Pearlman also looks forward to a fictional 21st century and imagines the collaboration between editors and directors as a kind of ‘Vulcan Mind Meld’. Martin Armiger, as noted above, is wary of the word collaborator, but ultimately argues, like Walter Murch, that ‘Filmmaking depends on an almost transcendental belief that there is a reality called ‘the film’ that will itself determine what it needs to tell its story, and how to achieve its own success or failure. What we do, those of us who work on films, is put ourselves at the disposal of this emerging identity.’
The identity of this issue on collaboration has emerged slowly, sometimes painfully as we struggled to find contributors who would break with tradition of unquestioned acceptance of ‘collaboration’ as an absolute in industry, and interrogate the concept. This issue has been a long time in the making, a collaboration between serendipity and sheer force of will to get from concept to print. Ultimately it is its own form of collaboration, now, between the reader and the collection of ideas. We hope that it offers an opportunity to ask questions about one of the big, but often undefined, forces in our industry, and to ‘work with’ a diversity of answers.
This article first appeared as an introduction to Lumina, which is now available from the AFTRS shop.
