Theoretical comfort zone

The picture functions here as an illustration

                                                                                             

Imagine you are driving a car. You are very proud of yourself and of the whole situation. Your car is expensive, not everybody can afford it. Your driving skills are excellent. You turn on the music you like, the temperature that is comfortable to. Your stuff is next to your, your coat, notebook, coffee, navigator. You are fully equipped. But then everything changes. Imagine your car stopped working (expensive cars are usually good enough not to break down so easily) but just imagine. You lost everything. Or better to say, not just lost but can't use it any more. You are out of your car, in an unknown place, maybe in the middle of the field. There is wind and rain and nothing can protect you. Your smartphone died, the car's engine does not work and doesn't give heat anymore, the navigator can't receive the signal.

The shift between two situations, the quick shift, creates the feeling of vulnerability. And, to my mind, this is precisely the feeling Alyssa Grossman tried to describe when she told her story about shooting Bucharest. Bela's question about similarities between writing a research proposal and making a documentary film, and particularly about the function of a research question both in writing and in film,  elicited an unexpectedly sincere confession by Alyssia. After spending the year doing theoretical research on memory, she had only very vague ideas of how to make film out of this. She digged herself deeper in theories and writing but it did not facilitate visual creativity. And then at one moment she decided to close her computer and go out of the room right into the city park. She felt vulnerable, she felt lost, but she started exploring and shooting. She thought her visual materials were useless, she had doubts and hesitations, she did not believe it worked out. But then suddenly something emerged out of material collected. An idea of a film emerged.

I am interested in such kind of shifts. It seems like different ideas emerge in different situations and contexts. Does crossing the boundaries of your comfort zone boost your creativity? Vulnerability forces you to turn yourself from narticistic contemplation to careful attention to the surroundings. You start looking for the meaning and potentialities outside  not inside you. When you appear in the field of unknown, you are forced to activate the transferable skills from your previous experience and not to follow the patterns and schemas of known and familiar. How does it work? Why such kind of shifts are so productive? My curiosity is not so much about psychology here, but about the fact that writing a text and shooting a film are so profoundly different that the shift displays totally different experiences. Alyssa mentioned that if you do not transcend, you end up with a  very intellectual project, you squize the reality to find what you know. That means you will remain blind to the context, you'll remain in your car even if your (theoretical) car doesn't bring you anywhere.

Important links:
Alyssa Grossman. Into the Field (2006) http://www.der.org/films/into-the-field.html