One thing I really like about film making is that it’s an inherently collaborative art form, in a way equaled by no other. Other art forms can involve more than one person; the painter can have someone to clean brushes, or the sculptor someone to carry away detritus, but all of the artistic work is done by essentially one person. Even when you look at something like a mural, each artist has taken their section of the work as separate from the others’ and while you end up with a single collaborative work, each piece of it is distinguishably “owned” by a single painter.
In a film, it is very rare to see the work of just one person at any given time. While there is some notion that the director of a film owns it single artistic vision, and in some cases you have a single person who is director, writer and actor all at once, there is still the contribution of everyone else involved in the film to consider. You have other actors, camera operators, set designers and costume designers to consider, along with a host of post-production artists like editors, composers, foley artists, sound mixers and various special effects creators. Even the smallest production is going to have at least half a dozen people with their fingers in the artistic pie, as it were.
This brings up a lot of interesting problems that never existed before; for example, we have the issue of credit. You might not be aware of it, but there are volumes of rules surrounding proper crediting; each job on a film has an associated guild (or union), and each guild stringently enforces who must be credited for what, and various complicated procedures for resolving conflicts. It is, I hear, a pain sometimes, but it avoids situations like Boris Karloff’s after making Frankenstein: he was credited simply as “?”, while a cute joke for the audience, not great for his own career.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Anyways, I think collaborative artwork is cool, and I think filmmaking is a good example of that.