Work and Mastery (2)

Work (as a process by which people are transformed through doing) and mastery (as the illusion of control over what one produces) are two distinct logics. Distinguishing them seems central to me for the practice of mediation through creation, whether therapeutic, educational, creative, or artistic.

Mastery is a myth

The belief in mastery is deeply rooted in our relationship to creation. We learn it at school: drawing well means drawing what one wanted to draw, the way one wanted to draw it. Writing well means clearly expressing what one had in mind. Making a good film means controlling the framing, the light, the sound, the editing so that the result corresponds to the original intention. Mastery is the alignment of intention and result.

I have been a filmmaker for decades myself, and I can affirm that this mastery does not exist. No filmmaker, no photographer, no painter wholly controls what they produce. There is always a part of accident, of chance, of the unconscious, of matter that resists, of world that imposes itself. And it is in this unmastered part that what is most interesting in a work often lies. Great artists know this and work with the accident.

This unmastered part has an explanation. André Leroi-Gourhan, in Le Geste et la parole (1964-1965), showed that the hand is not a mere executor of the brain’s orders. The freeing of the hand by the upright stance preceded the emergence of language and symbolic thought: it is by doing that the human being learned to think. The hand knows things that consciousness does not know. The British anthropologist Tim Ingold extended this idea in several books by showing that gestures of making are not the application of a prior mental plan but a thought that unfolds in contact with matter. The potter does not think their gesture before performing it; they discover it by shaping the clay, which resists, which proposes, which calls for an adjustment. Thought does not precede action; it is elaborated alongside it.

Neuroscience confirms this intuition. Alain Berthoz, in Le Sens du mouvement (1997) and then in La Décision (2003), shows that the acting brain does not function like the brain that anticipates or plans. When one is in action, thought proceeds through rapid adjustments, through perceptive anticipation, through coupling with what the body is doing in the moment. It is another regime of cognition. The idea of a prior, purely theoretical conception that would yield the best possible actions is a fiction. The best actions arise instead from a disposition to think while acting. And in the moment of acting, a transformation takes place, whether one wills it or not. Wanting to ward this transformation off is what we call mastery: a relationship to the world based on control, which is, in the end, a relationship of violence and domination.

When, in a French class, we ask “what did the author mean?”, we posit mastery as the explanatory principle of art. The author meant something, and our task as readers is to recover this original intention. This is, I think, the silliest question there is. It reduces the work to an intentional message and erases everything it carries beyond its author’s intention: the cultural resonances, the unconscious traces, the multiple readings that each era, each person brings to it. I have heard interviews with authors who said, with great honesty: I don’t really know why I did it that way. It just came out that way.

What is work?

The traditional etymology derives “travail” from tripalium, an instrument of torture used in the Middle Ages, and from this comes the idea that to work is to suffer. More recent etymological studies show a much older root, kindred to the English word travel: the journey, the displacement. We also speak of the work of birth, the work of mourning, therapeutic work, work on oneself. The word, here, designates a process by which something that was a certain way becomes otherwise. This process is not controlled. One has an intention, one discovers in the doing, and what one discovers is often very different from what one had planned.

This is what happens in a creative workshop. We pose an intention, a theme, a constraint, we provide tools, a frame, a limited time, and we make. We do our best, in the time we have, with the means we have. We cannot think too much, we cannot plan too much, we are entirely invested in the doing. And what emerges has all the marks of work in the sense of journey: we have been displaced, transformed, by the simple fact of doing.

The unforeseen as richness

I will take a precise example, a workshop I often run: making a short cut-paper animation film. The setup is simple. On a large table: magazines, scissors, colored paper. A camera is mounted high above a working surface and broadcasts the image live onto a large screen. A microphone records the sound. Musical instruments are available in the room. In small groups, the participants cut out characters, objects, shapes from the magazines, then make a film by moving these elements under the camera, while at the same time inventing a soundtrack with their voices and the instruments. The film is seen as it is being made. It is projected, together, almost immediately.

The order in which we proceed in this workshop is an important methodological point. Often, we begin by thinking about what we want to make, then we look for the means to carry it out. We have an intention, and we look for matter to serve it.

I propose the opposite. We start with matter. We cut, we explore, we look at what we have found, and only then do we see what we can make of it. In the first order, intention precedes matter, which must yield to it; if matter does not match intention, we are stuck in failure. In the second, intention is built in contact with matter, which leads us to places where prior thought could never have gone.

A participant once said to me: “We get into a group, we think about something, and then we cut out what we need, is that it?” I had to reply that this was the opposite of what I was proposing. Her formulation was nevertheless worth pausing on. This logic (first thinking, then making) is the logic of school and of rational planning. It works very poorly in creation: we have an intention in our heads, and afterwards we cannot find what we need. Frustration is guaranteed.

When we start instead from what we find, when we let ourselves be surprised by the images cut from magazines, by the colors, by the shapes, by the words, something unforeseen can come about. This unforeseen is what gives the workshop its scope: what escapes conscious control leaves a place for what the person carries without knowing it.

The long take as ethics

The film itself is then shot in a long take (plan séquence), in one go, without cuts, without editing afterwards. This does not mean that we have only one chance: we can redo the entire film, several times if need be, and choose the take that suits the group. What we forbid ourselves is only the cutting and reassembling of shots that would “improve” the film after the fact.

The real subject of this constraint is not technical, it is collective. The long take requires being together, in real time, all the way through. No one can step out to think; no one can suspend the action to reconfigure it. This continuity creates an intensity of attention to one another that has no equivalent in setups where one can cut and resume. When someone places a character under the camera, the others must react, support, prolong. When an instrument plays, the others adjust. It is collective work in the strong sense, in which each person holds at arm’s length the fact that the film can reach its end.

This crossing transforms because we are caught in the continuum of reality, which we cannot stop in order to master. I tell the participants that they must go to the end at all costs, stay in the characters, in the situation, without breaking. If something is not right, we will redo the entire film, we will not patch it up. This requirement forces us to improvise along the way, to invent things we would never have dared invent in a setting where everything is prepared in advance.

When the group redoes the film several times in a row, something becomes embodied. These are no longer discussed ideas; it is a material experience: the gesture that places the characters, the rhythm of the body that accompanies the movement of the images, the presence of bodies to one another around the table. The making mobilizes that intelligence of body and movement that Leroi-Gourhan and Ingold identified. The transformation is not mental, it is embodied. Ideas inscribe themselves in gesture, not in the commentary one might make about it.

This mobilization of the body has another effect, one that matters greatly. As each person does their best for the long take to hold to the end, each person lets go, without realizing it, of their habitual attempts at mastery. We let go of the superego, that censor who normally tells us what is done and what is not done, because we do not have time to consult it. And when the superego fades, the unconscious can express itself: the personal unconscious, but also the collective unconscious of the group. Then very deep, very strong, very accurate things arise, far more so than if people had stayed within mastery. This is what Winnicott called the transitional space: a space where one no longer quite knows what comes from oneself, what comes from others, what comes from matter, and where something happens.

The choice of the long take touches on another subject, which must be named for itself: the question of who the film belongs to. If the workshop foresees editing, it is almost always the facilitator who will do it, afterwards, alone in front of their screen. By editing, they will “improve” the film: cut what is not good, keep what is good, reorganize, smooth. The film will then cease to belong to the participants. It will become the facilitator’s film, made out of their material. The long take prevents this drift. It allows us to see the film right away, together, without waiting for a professional to step in. The film belongs to those who made it, with its imperfections, which are the traces of the process.

I would rather modify my technical setup so that it serves the workshop’s objectives (whether therapeutic, educational, creative, or artistic) than subject those objectives to an ideal of technical quality. Our technical choices are never neutral; they embody an ethics.

There is no right way

Often, when an audiovisual professional intervenes in a context of mediation, a myth sets in: this person is going to teach us how the professionals do it, and the professionals’ way becomes the right way, the one we then try to conform to.

Yet there is no right way to make films. I say this as a filmmaker: ways of making are infinite. They vary from one country to another, from one era to another, from one filmmaker to another. In Burkina Faso, where I work regularly, the methods of shooting are very different from those taught in France. In Georgia, in the United States, in Poland, everywhere, filmmakers invent their own processes.

For those of us who are professionals of care, of education, of cultural mediation, the challenge is not to imitate audiovisual professionals but to dialogue with them: to see what we can borrow from their practices and put it at the service of our own aims, whether therapeutic, educational, creative, or artistic. It is about accompanying people in an experience in which something shifts within them.

What counts is this journey, this crossing. And when we ourselves, as facilitators, learn something from others and are transformed by the process, it means there has been travail, in the sense of journey and transformation.