Movies About Creative Thinking: Inventors and engineers

Part one of seven. Films about people who were solving a specific problem and, along the way, invented something that had not existed before.

You can watch these in any order, but this part sets the steadiest mood: the stories here are mostly about things working out.

An American corporation decides to win Le Mans and hires a designer who knows how to push a car to its limit.

Topics: engineering iteration (test, failure, refinement, test again), trust between the designer and the driver, a technical decision colliding with corporate politics, a craftsman's intuition against the reporting line.

Aftertaste: bracing, exhilarating, with the feeling of an honest win. One of those films that leaves you wanting to build or repair something with your hands.

Three women at NASA in the early sixties compute trajectories, master a new kind of computing machine, and gradually change the rules around them.

Topics: competence as a way to claim a place in a closed system, learning a new technology before it displaces your job, team mathematics under a deadline, an environment that resists talent.

Aftertaste: inspiring and bright, yet with a clear residue of injustice. You leave satisfied, but not lulled.

A self-taught mathematician from Madras arrives in Cambridge with notebooks of formulas he arrived at intuitively. His mentor demands proofs.

Topics: intuition and rigorous proof as two different stages, the student and mentor relationship, a cultural barrier inside the scientific world, the price of recognition.

Aftertaste: quiet, moving, with sadness at the end. A classic British biographical drama that holds you through the relationship between two people.

A teacher invents the intermittent windshield wiper by modelling the way a human eyelid works, and then finds his solution in other people's cars.

Topics: authorship and its legal form, principle against compromise, what years of litigation do to a family, a simple idea as a full-fledged invention.

Aftertaste: stubborn and slightly draining. Viewers usually describe a mix of respect for the man and fatigue with him.

A mining town, 1957, the launch of Sputnik. A schoolboy decides to build rockets and gets a series of explosions instead of results.

Topics: a run of fast failed attempts as a way of learning, the move from enthusiasm to calculation, conflict with a father and with an assigned fate, the role of one teacher.

Aftertaste: warm, nostalgic, distinctly uplifting. The kind of film people rewatch when they need to believe in a plan.

Malawi, a drought, a family with no money for school. A teenager builds a wind turbine out of a bicycle and scrapyard parts after reading a textbook in the library.

Topics: a solution built from what is already at hand, access to knowledge as a resource, convincing adults who do not believe you, engineering under survival conditions.

Aftertaste: heavy at first, very bright towards the end. Many describe it as a film that wears you out and rewards you in the last twenty minutes.

Miyazaki's anime about an aircraft designer who wanted to build beautiful machines and built military ones.

Topics: responsibility for how your creation is used, the beauty of an engineered object, a dream and its price, work as a form of love and as a form of escape.

Aftertaste: aching, beautiful, with a long resonance. The most melancholy film in this part; viewers often call it quietly heartbreaking.

Next part: limits that help.

The whole series:

1. Inventors and engineers
2. Limits that help
3. Obsessed with the craft
4. A change of viewpoint
5. When nothing comes
6. Making it together
7. Documentaries