Philippe petit biography high wire distilling

In the vein of The Creative Habit and The Artist's Way, a new manifesto on the creative process from a master of the impossible. Since well before his epic 1974 walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Philippe Petit had become an artist who answered first and foremost to the demands of his craft?not only on the high wire, but also as a magician, street juggler, visual artist, builder, and writer. A born rebel like many creative people, he was from an early age a voracious learner who taught himself, cultivating the attitudes, resources, and techniques to tackle even seemingly impossible feats. His outlaw sensibility spawned a unique approach to the creative process?an approach he shares, with characteristic enthusiasm, irreverence, and originality in Creativity: The Perfect Crime. Making the reader his accomplice, Petit reveals new and unconventional ways of going about the artistic endeavor, from generating and shaping ideas to practicing and problem-solving to pulling off the ?coup" itself?executing a finished work. The strategies and insights he shares will resonate with performers of every stripe (actors, musicians, dancers) and practitioners of the non-performing arts (painters, writers, sculptors), and also with ordinary mortals in search of fresh ways of tackling the challenges and possibilities of everyday existence.

Make no mistake.
I frown upon books about creativity.
Too often they gather only formulas, point at Einstein and the Beatles but
rarely at the author, propose exercises that mistake the mind for a gym machine
and conclude each chapter with a recap worthy of fifth-graders. In
aiming at the universal—to satisfy the commonest denominator of human
thinking and behavior—most of these books miss all of the originality, the
humor, the serendipity, the grace, the exceptions to the rule, the idiosyncrasies
that mold the way of art.
 
So if I don&

In this season of the big movie award events, we are listing 9 of the greatest films that teach us about art and the urge to create.

Although artists often work in solitude, we don’t exist in a vacuum. We are in a constant dialogue with the inner and outer world, responding to information and stimulation in order to be part of the greater conversation. 

Films can be a valuable source of grist for the mill. Watching, as an art form itself, with impeccable attention paid to images, light and color, or perhaps the stories themselves directly or inadvertently spark ideas, provide encouragement or grant the permission we sometimes seek. Artist biofilms can offer us deeper insight into art history, an artist’s process, or simply offer encouragement and permission to imagine.

Historian and playwright, Howard Zinn, believed that films were an essential way to teach history. These films can help us contextualize, appreciate, and understand the conditions under which these artists lived and worked. 

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post).

This past weekend saw the release of “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda,” the latest in a recent string of impressively strong and commercially successful biographical documentaries (other recent standouts include “RBG” and “Won’t You Be my Neighbor?”). 

This week’s question: What is the best biographical documentary ever made?

Siddhant Adlakha (@SidizenKane), Freelance for The Village Voice, /Film

The best and arguably most important documentaries ever made are complimentary pieces by Joshua Oppenheimer, “The Act of Killing” (2013) and “The Look of Silence (2015). They’re set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide, believed to be sponsored by the C.I.A., but they’re each rooted in the lives of singular subjects and their diametrically opposed journeys.

The cleansing, of an estimated three million ethnic Chinese, changed the face of the nation in terrifying ways, created a longstanding socio-political status quo that deifies its perpetrators while continuing to villainize its victims to this day. The first film, “The Act of Killing,” follows mass murderer Anwar Congo over the course of seven years, exploring the personal cognitive dissonance that permeates the culture around him. Congo, an avowed American film fan, re-enacts each of his many killings in stylized manner akin to the genre films he grew up on. Though as he reflects on his actions through a lens of cinema, his bizarre cinematic journey results in the peeling back of the layers of his humanity until he’s forced, as if by something within, to face up to what he̵