Recreatio ex Nihilo

Can art include elements which are not re-creative?

If you recall, Ayn Rand defined art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments,” meaning simply a model of the world that emphasizes what its creator considers important in life. To achieve this emphasis, an artist picks and chooses what to include in his model.

For example, if he believes that the efficacy of reason is an illusion, he might make a movie about scientists using genetic engineering to revive the dinosaurs for a theme park, and then include the creatures escaping and eating a bunch of people.

He would not include the project’s investors making a huge profit on a successful park, even if he believed that such a thing could happen, because on his view that outcome would be an accident.

But suppose some scientists really had revived the dinosaurs, and they really had escaped from captivity, and this had been recorded on video. Would it be in keeping with the principles of a rational esthetics to use this footage in a movie? Is it legitimate to use something real in a work of fiction?