When I invite a group to make a film, I almost always give the same instruction before any other: start by finding a place, and don’t decide anything until you have found it. People who arrive with an idea spend their time looking in the space for what they already have in their heads, and see nothing else. I have given this instruction hundreds of times over fifteen years, in museums, schools, libraries, community centres and professional training, and I consider it part of a method rather than a piece of common-sense advice. Simone Weil, Merleau-Ponty, Tim Ingold and research in neuroscience help me understand why it works, and draw a few rules from it for people who run workshops.
Staying in your head
When you ask someone to do something, a film in this case, though it applies to many other things, their first reaction is almost always to look for an idea in their head. They find one or they don’t, and if they do, they set off with it like a shopping list: I need a door, a staircase, someone running. The world was not made for our lists. So we spend a lot of time not finding, we settle for approximations, we are disappointed, and the resulting film looks like the idea, only worse.
There is another way of entering a place. You wander without looking for anything, you let what is there come to you, and you only decide when something holds you. This way of working is richer, and it is also faster, which seems paradoxical if you have never tried it. That is why I allow little time, a quarter of an hour for a photograph, an hour for a film. Having little time forces you to look close at hand, in what is there. We tell ourselves we would need more time to make something good, that with more thought we would go further. It is often the opposite, because in that extra time we put up barriers. We judge the idea before trying it, we anticipate how others will see it, we compare it with what we have seen elsewhere, we rationalise, and what might have happened no longer happens. When time is short, we still think; we simply no longer have the leisure to watch ourselves.
Entering into dialogue with a place
One could see this as nothing more than a trick for being more creative. I believe the stakes are wider, and concern the experience people have in an audiovisual mediation workshop. A person who imposes on the world an idea they had in mind remains alone with themselves; the world is only a set for their project, and when the set resists, they fail. A person who lets a place inspire them, on the other hand, enters into dialogue with it: they receive, they respond, they discover things they could not have invented, and what they create bears the mark of that dialogue. We are no longer in our heads, we are in the world, with things and with other people. It is a completely different experience, and I believe it is the one people come looking for without knowing it when they agree to take part in a workshop.
There is also a question of the quality of the work. Films born of this dialogue are often better, because the place brings to them what no one could have asked for, a light, a rhythm, a texture of sound, and viewers sense this presence of the world even when they cannot name it. And finally there is a question that goes beyond mediation: we tend to want to understand everything and to reduce all creation to rational intentions, whereas the most important things we do often belong to other states of consciousness, quite real, which can now be observed in the brain, and which are not lived by watching ourselves do them. Reducing everything to rationality is, in my view, a mistake, and in a well-designed workshop, one can experience something else.
A negative effort
In 1942, in “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, a text later included in Waiting for God (1950), Simone Weil wrote the most accurate definition I know of the state I am talking about:
“Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. [...] Attention consists in suspending our thought, leaving it available, empty and penetrable to the object.”
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, 1942.
She adds that we often mistake a muscular effort, a frown, for attention, and that this kind of effort produces nothing. The availability I ask of participants in front of a place is of this kind: a negative effort, which consists in suspending what one had in mind in order to let oneself be penetrated by what is there. And thanks to Weil, I understand better why a short time helps. She writes herself that twenty minutes of intense, untiring attention are “infinitely better than three hours of this frowning application” that gives us the sense of duty done. When there is no time to tense up, the emptiness comes faster than one thinks.
Neuroscientists have observed something similar in the brain. In 2008, Charles Limb and Allen Braun placed jazz pianists in an MRI scanner and compared what happened in their brains when they played a piece learned by heart and when they improvised. During improvisation, a region of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with self-control and with monitoring one’s own actions, was deactivated, while an area of the medial prefrontal cortex, linked to self-expression, became active. In other words, improvising means, in the brain, switching off the inner watchman. The barriers we put up when we have time may correspond to the activity of this region which checks, compares and censors, and my hypothesis is that the time constraint prevents it from gaining the upper hand.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described, under the name of flow (1990), the experience of a person so absorbed in what they are doing that self-consciousness disappears, time is distorted, and action and awareness seem to merge; he observed that this state arises when the difficulty of the task and the person’s skills are in balance, and that clear goals and immediate feedback on what one is doing encourage it. In a time-limited creative workshop, with a simple instruction and a screening straight afterwards, these conditions are almost all met.
The landscape thinks itself in me
What remains is to understand why, when we are available, the place starts to offer us something. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), reports this remark by the painter: “The landscape thinks itself in me,” he said, “and I am its consciousness.” The painter does not project his vision onto the landscape; it is the landscape that thinks itself in him, and one can read Merleau-Ponty’s whole phenomenology as a way of taking this sentence seriously, of showing that perception is not the passive reception of data by a separate subject, but an intertwining in which world and body answer one another. Tim Ingold extended this idea to making. In Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), he goes back to the model Western philosophy inherited from Aristotle, the hylomorphic model, according to which making consists in imposing a form conceived in advance on passive matter; he shows that craftspeople, architects and artists, when you watch them work, do nothing of the kind, that form arises from a correspondence between their gestures and the properties of materials, and that the maker follows the materials rather than dominating them. I take the place of a workshop to be a material in Ingold’s sense: those who follow it find what those who try to impose a form on it will not.
The Situationists made this availability into a practice. Guy Debord, in “Theory of the Dérive” (1956), describes a way of moving about in which one gives up, for a time, one’s usual reasons for moving and acting, and lets oneself “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”. He points out that chance plays a smaller part than one might think: cities have a psychogeographical relief, with currents and fixed points, and the dérive requires both this letting go and a knowledge of that relief. Debord practised the dérive across a whole city; I ask for the same availability in a museum or a street.
Finally, anthropologists of trance help me understand what is bodily and cultural about this state. Gilbert Rouget, in Music and Trance (1980), showed that trance is not an exotic phenomenon but a general human possibility, which each society frames with devices, music, rhythm, gestures, roles, and that it is learned. Georges Lapassade, in Les États modifiés de conscience (1987) and La Transe (1990), extended this idea to the whole range of states in which ordinary consciousness is altered, from daydreaming to creative absorption, insisting that our societies have repressed them and that certain practices, artistic ones in particular, make it possible to recover them. I am not claiming that a one-hour workshop induces trance. I note that the devices these authors describe, a frame, an imposed rhythm, roles, a lifting of ordinary censorship, closely resemble the ones I put in place without having looked for them, and that people experience something there that is hard to name, which can only be known by living it.
Being ready
I know this state from the inside, and it is from there that I built the method. For years, I never left home without a camera in my pocket, and every time I went out of the door I knew I was ready. I was available, and the world sometimes offered me things. Places inspired me, and I did not even decide; it decided for me, and I found myself shooting long takes that my surroundings offered me and that have mattered in my life (some of them became the film Unaware actors). Put like this, it may sound esoteric. It is no more esoteric than what Limb and Braun’s pianists were doing when they improvised in the MRI scanner. At the moment I am not filming, and I can clearly feel that I have closed up: when I go out, I no longer prepare myself to be able to film, and the world no longer offers me anything. I also know that if I decide to become available again, by thinking about it every time I go out, it will come back.
Some filmmakers have built their way of shooting around this availability. David Lynch devoted a book, Catching the Big Fish (2006), to the way ideas come to him, like fish one waits for rather than makes, and catches by going deeper. On the set of the third season of Twin Peaks, broadcast in 2017, he complained, in front of the camera filming behind the scenes, that “you don’t get a chance to sink into anything.” He was speaking for the whole team, and his films show where this sinking takes the actors: into altered states that cannot be reached directly and that have to be worked towards; this sequence gives a key to his way of working. Robert Bresson shot dozens of takes of each shot, not to obtain perfect acting, but so that the acting would disappear, until his performers, whom he called models, found again the automatism of the gestures of life. He put it this way in Notes on the Cinematographer (1975): “Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.” By very different paths, Lynch and Bresson seek the same moment, when the person has stopped willing and something passes through them. Cinema, as a mechanical recording of what took place, keeps a trace of this passage, and that, I believe, is why it fascinates, as photography does. There is something in the image that escapes us and that we can explore.
In mediation, the question becomes: how can we help people, in one hour, to be ready? I do not think explaining achieves it, because explanation strengthens the inner watchman, but a device that short-circuits it does: a short time, a light instruction that concerns the frame and not the content, the injunction to find a place first, and an immediate screening, which lets people see what they have done before judgement has had time to settle in. I showed in The creative unconscious, a method for collective creation how a group that gives up trying to structure everything brings forth, without seeking it, a coherent film, and in Letting Go of One’s Criteria how the person running the workshop must also set aside their own criteria. I have already told the story of the place instruction in When thirty-five professionals discover their psychosocial skills through creative experience, and described the photographic protocol, in which the person who took the photo stays silent while the others comment on it, in Participatory reverse photography workshop. Here I draw a few rules from all this, which I offer to people who run workshops.
From the instruction to the screening
- The place before the idea, stated as a rule. Explore first. Don’t tell yourself, as you leave this room, what the film will be. Let yourself be surprised, and when a spot holds you, see what can be invented there. Stating this instruction as a rule protects people from their own reflex.
- Little time, and say so openly. A quarter of an hour for a photograph, an hour for a film. Announce that it is short, that this is deliberate, and that no one is expected to make anything perfect. The constraint should be felt as a help, not as an ordeal.
- An instruction about the frame, never about the content. A broad theme, a formal constraint, a hand in the picture, a talking object, a long take. Nothing about what to say. The content will come from the place.
- Don’t explain the method before people have experienced it. Explaining availability means asking people to think about it, and therefore to stop being in it. Do first, understand afterwards, at the screening.
- Cut out, handle, move about before thinking. In a cut-paper workshop, cut without knowing what you are going to make; in a photography workshop, walk first. The idea comes from the gesture.
- Accept that people leave without a plan. They almost always come back with something, and that something depends on a detail of the place that no one knew twenty minutes earlier. The few who come back empty-handed have seen things, and by watching the others’ films at the screening, they will find more.
- Screen straight away. Immediate feedback on what one has done is one of the conditions of the flow described by Csikszentmihalyi, and it comes before judgement has had time to close over the experience.
- Don’t ask people to explain what they meant to do. Ask what they found. The difference between the two questions is the whole difference between imposing and receiving.
- Protect what the group received from the place against after-the-fact rationalisation. When the group discovers in a film a coherence that no one decided on, don’t explain it, don’t claim it. Leave it to the place and to the group.
- Keep yourself ready. Through their attitude, the person running the workshop shows the group availability, or closedness. If they have planned everything, the group will plan everything; if they let themselves be surprised by the place, by a suggestion, by something unexpected, the group will understand that it is allowed to do the same.
John Dewey already said, in Art as Experience (1934), that aesthetic experience arises from an interaction between an organism and its environment, and not from an inner form imposed on an indifferent outside. The instruction to find the place before deciding is a very practical way of taking Dewey at his word, and having little time prevents us from going back, while we search, to a form decided in advance. It does not take long years of workshops to bring this to life: an hour is enough, with a rule and a place one has not yet looked at.
