A movie can help us create something beautiful.
Cinema has always been considered a means of escape from reality. Although it is an art, it remains in our imagination as a place of dreams, an art that recreates our lives and narrates them.
Yet cinema as an art makes use of enormous creativity. And creativity is not only evasion from everyday life.
How many times do we leave the cinema and feel the need to create something, to change our lives, to write, play music, sing?
That’s the power of cinema: to talk about reality, to improve it, to describe it, to transform it.
A movie can prompt creativity in many ways.
There is no such thing as an inspiring movie. Or rather, there is no such thing as one movie or the film that has the elements elements to inspire. That’s because each movie elicits different experiences and perceptions in us different perceptions.
Below I will suggest five movies that have inspired me and that, if I see them again, make my brain move. I see them again and they make my brain and hands move.
They are only the first of a long list that I will slowly suggest here in the blog.
But if you have titles of movies that I haven’t seen, I’d be happy if you’d put in the comments the one that inspires you.
And especially why it inspires you.
Happy viewing!
- Stealing Beauty (1996, Bernardo Bertolucci)
The plot. Lucy is an American girl who is sent by her father to a couple of friends in a wonderful house in Tuscany, in the hills of Siena.
The house is a sort of community that hosts a group of artists and aesthetes.
The girl’s stay becomes an initiatory journey in which she becomes a woman and in which the contact with art becomes a lesson and a life lesson.
Why it inspires creativity. Rites of passage are always metaphors for change. In this film, beauty is a major driver of the story. Human beauty, the beauty the beauty of landscapes, the beauty of art. Every shot educates our gaze to beauty. beauty. But alongside all this beauty, there is the illness of one of the protagonists, there is the girl who arrives in Italy after the suicide of her mother. girl who arrives in Italy after her mother’s suicide.
Love and death, beauty and youth, beauty and art. There are all the elements to inspire us.
This film always pushes me to start something, to see myself as a teenager again. I feel the urge to I feel the urge to rediscover the adolescent I was and to pick up a sheet of paper to draw.
2. Renoir (2012, Gilles Bourdos)
The plot. It is 1915 on the French Riviera. Renoir is old and ill and paints with extreme difficulty. These are his last years of life. His wife has just died, his son Jean (future director) is at war. Andrée arrives, a young model but also the last for Renoir, who will later become Jean’s wife and actress.
Why it inspires creativity. The film is a little slow, but it reveals the difficulty of painting when one is sick and old. Renoir is heavy, aching, harsh. In contrast to what he paints. Here we describe everyday life with the rhythms cadenced by Renoir’s illness and profession. Next to this explosion of colors of the countryside where he lives and draws inspiration, it seems to be in an impressionist painting.
This film takes us into the life of a great painter, but gives a new space to the model Andrée Heusch.
model Andrée Heuschling who would later become Catherine Hessling, actress for Jean Renoir and other directors until 1935. With the advent of sound cinema ends his career and will die in 1979, the same year of her ex-husband Jean.
The film is an opportunity to see inspiring landscapes, to get to know a little-remembered actress and to breathe the air of Impressionism.
3. Turner (2014, Mike Leigh)
The Plot. Turner’s life over the past 25 years. The famous and acclaimed artist travels throughout Europe for inspiration. He lives with his father when he returns home, is anaffective and eccentric, and his eccentricity explodes completely with the death of his father. Celebrated and despised by all, he paves the way for the Impressionists and abstract art.
Why it inspires creativity. As in Renoir, we discover for the umpteenth time that private life almost never parallels
private life is almost never parallel to art and if the first can be deplorable, the second can be sublime.
Turner urges us to observe and transfigure nature. He himself a great scholar of light and color. When I see this film again, I find the need to study the colors, perception according to light and dust in the air. And he reminds us that painting is also science.
4. Loving Vincent (2017, Dorota Kobiela e Hugh Welchman)
The plot. Armand Roulin, an inconclusive young man with no aspirations, embarks on a
journey into art and the mystery of the disappearance of one of the most important painters of all time, Vincent Van Gogh.
Why it inspires creativity. This is the first film entirely painted on canvas, reworking over a thousand paintings for a total of 66960 frames made by 125 artists.
It is a feast for the eyes, an explosion of colors and shapes. Here Van Gogh comes to life and each frame looks like a painting into which the viewer can enter.
The story unfolds as if it were a painting in motion. There is so much life, color, and form in motion that you will always feel amazement and disbelief. If you’re looking for something that moves your soul, eyes and imagination, I think it’s for you.
5. Big Eyes (2014, Tim Burton)
The plot. Towards the end of the 1950s, the artist Walter Keane achieves incredible success thanks to his portraits of children with big eyes. However, no one knows that the real author of the paintings is his wife, Margaret, who is too insecure and shy to rebel. Only after their marriage ends does the truth come out.
Why it inspires creativity. Tim Burton is always a guarantee of inspiration. Whether it’s movies with real actors or with characters invented on paper, the reality he tells is always interesting and deep.
Here there are several interesting levels. The atmosphere of the sixties with its colors and its shapes, are an explosion of creativity. But not only that, it is finally giving space to the painter who actually created the paintings with the big eyes. Burton gives the space she deserves to the real author and this greatly inspires me and those like me who fight machismo in art. Alongside Margareth’s creativity is Peggy Doris Hawkins, her real name.
How can this story inspire us?
By giving us the courage to expose ourselves to the world with what we know how to do, giving back space to women who behind the scenes have fostered the success of men. And if that doesn’t inspire us, what will?
Freedom of expression, especially in art.
Enjoy and tell me in the comments other threads, I’m curious to explore other spaces
creative spaces thanks to cinema!
And if you want to delve into your creativity, here’s a little free e-book for you.
