In professional cinema, you write first and shoot afterwards, because you have to convince the people who provide the money, far more than out of any creative necessity. In a workshop, you can improvise within a framework, watch, and improvise again taking into account what you have seen: you then write with images and sounds, and the group puts into it what no single person would have written.
Every time I suggest to teachers or cultural mediators that they shoot a collective film in which each person invents their part without knowing anyone else’s, I get the same objection: you would first need to write a script, so that it all hangs together. I reply that it is an exquisite corpse, that we will see afterwards, and that the coherence has a good chance of being there without anyone having manufactured it. In The creative unconscious, a method for collective creation I explained why this coherence appears, drawing on Winnicott, on Bion and, through Romain Graziani’s book, on the Taoist thought of non-action. Here I would like to take that work further on two points I had not developed there: what psychoanalysts of groups and practitioners of theatrical improvisation have understood about what circulates between people when they create together, and the method of writing in successive layers (improvise, watch, improvise again), which makes it possible to arrive quickly, without a script, at elaborate forms.
The script first, a convention dictated by money
I have nothing against scripts. I write them, I teach screenwriting, and I have devoted a section of this site to that kind of writing, Creating, thinking and writing screenplays today. But it has to be said why the script is placed before everything else. In professional cinema, you write first because you have to convince funders, broadcasters, committees, and all you can show them is paper, so that the script is a financing instrument before it is a creative one. It then serves to organise the whole making of the film (preparation, shooting, editing): convincing and organising are the two functions I give it in What is the purpose of a screenplay ?. When you do not need to look for money, nothing obliges you to proceed this way. You can perfectly well imagine your film otherwise than in written words, which have little to do with audiovisual form, and if schools and workshops spontaneously reproduce the professional order, it is by imitating the trade, not out of creative necessity.
I suggest proceeding differently. You give yourselves a framework, a technical protocol that obliges you to go all the way (the sequence shot, the camera passed from hand to hand, an instruction that gives a theme), and within that framework each person improvises their part. You still get a form, which you watch together straight away. That form gives you ideas. You can go back to shooting, improvise again, but taking into account what you have seen, and so on, layer upon layer. You are then writing with images and sounds, and you find ideas of rhythm, camera movement, balance of masses, sound surprises, purely audiovisual ideas you would never have had on paper and which, in a written film, would only have been effects added afterwards. In Film Your Scripts Instead of Writing Them ! I suggested filming guided improvisations in order to find the material for a script, but here I go further, since it is the improvisations themselves that make the film.
A group that dreams
To understand why a group whose members have said nothing to one another produces a coherent form, you have to accept that what governs our choices (taking this object, making it say this thing, standing in this spot) has a conscious part and a much larger part that is not conscious, and that this unconscious part is not locked up inside each person. Sigmund Freud opens Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) with the idea that the individual is never alone in their mental life:
“The contrast between Individual Psychology and Social or Group Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. […] In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well—in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words.”
Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, 1921, translated by James Strachey.
Carl Gustav Jung, for his part, posited beneath the personal unconscious, made of what each of us has repressed or forgotten, a deeper layer common to humanity, which he called the collective unconscious and whose contents, the archetypes, would be found in the myths, dreams and creations of every culture. I often use the expression collective unconscious to speak of what happens in a workshop, and I should make clear that I give it a more modest meaning than Jung did: by it I mean what a given group has in common without its having been said, the concerns people share, the images they saw together that morning, the place where everyone has the same frames and the same light before their eyes, the moods that pass from one person to another without going through words.
Psychoanalysts have looked closely at what happens in this way in groups. Didier Anzieu, in Le Groupe et l’inconscient (1975), argues that under certain conditions a group has a psychic life of its own, and he proposes an analogy I find very illuminating, between the group and the dream: “In my view, the group, the real group, is above all the imaginary fulfilment of a desire […]. Human subjects go into groups in the same way that, in their sleep, they enter into a dream” (my translation). René Kaës extended this intuition by speaking of a group psychic apparatus, a psychic organisation that belongs to no one in particular and that binds psyches together. And S. H. Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, described in 1964 the matrix of the group, the network of communications and relationships, conscious and unconscious, of which each member is a node, and in which everything that is said or done finds an echo.
I am not a psychoanalyst and I make no claim to run therapeutic groups. But in this work I find words for what I observe in every collective film: the eleven or fifteen people passing the camera to one another form, for the duration of the shot, a group that thinks without deliberating and produces a form. With a written script, this process would have been short-circuited, replacing what was circulating between people with what one or two of them had managed to put into words.
Spontaneity, exquisite corpse and walking backwards
In the theatre, others have explored the same ground. Jacob Levy Moreno, the inventor of psychodrama, defined spontaneity as “an adequate response to a new situation, or a novel response to an old situation”, and he set this spontaneity, which he held to be the source of all creation, against what he called the cultural conserve (the finished work, the written text, the score), which keeps the product of a past creation, but in which creation has stopped. The script is a cultural conserve in Moreno’s sense, whereas filmed improvisation is the moment of spontaneity, and the method I describe consists in keeping spontaneity alive at each layer, instead of putting it into a conserve from the first.
The surrealists had a related intuition when they invented the exquisite corpse around 1925: a sheet of paper was folded so that each player wrote their part of the sentence without seeing the others’. André Breton only wrote about the game in 1948:
“What exalted us in these productions was the certainty that, come what may, they bear the mark of what cannot be engendered by a single brain […]. With the Exquisite Corpse we had at our disposal, at last, an infallible means of sending the critical mind on holiday and of fully releasing the metaphorical activity of the mind.”
André Breton, “Le Cadavre exquis, son exaltation”, 1948, reprinted in “Le Surréalisme et la peinture”, 1965, my translation.
In the note the Centre Pompidou devotes to an exquisite corpse drawn in 1931 by Valentine Hugo, Nusch and Paul Éluard, one reads that the most “successful” ones are those in which “an analogical correspondence is established from one player to the next: the I waits for the you, guesses it, secretly holds out a hand to it” (my translation). The collective film is a filmed exquisite corpse, with two differences: what links the parts is no longer the sentence but the place, the same for everyone, and the outstretched hand is meant literally, since it is the camera that passes from hand to hand.
Finally, Keith Johnstone, who trained generations of actors in improvisation at the Royal Court Theatre in London and later in Calgary, described in Impro (1979) a movement very close to that of writing in layers:
“The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ’balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.”
Keith Johnstone, “Impro”, 1979.
Johnstone asked his students not to try to be original, because striving for originality took them away from themselves and made their work mediocre, and to accept what their partners offered instead of refusing it to impose their own idea. In his method, many rules concern the relationship between people (not blocking the other, building on what they offer) rather than the content, which then comes of its own accord. I find the same principle in the collective film: the instructions concern the passing of the camera, the voice, not laughing off camera, and while they may give a theme, they never set the words of the objects or characters.
Writing in images, layer after layer
Here is how I proceed. I have done it dozens of times since 2012, with children, students, researchers, youth workers and professionals, and some of these films can be seen in the Collective films section. In Aller au bout I recounted what the constraint of the sequence shot changes for the people involved.
The first layer is the place. Before any idea, you explore, you stop in front of a set, an object, a light, because ideas come from the world before they come from heads, so that the world enters the film from the outset. I developed this instruction in Ne cherchez pas dans le lieu ce que vous avez dans la tête. The second layer is improvisation within the framework: a simple instruction, a technical protocol in which you cannot stop, and each person does their part. The third is watching: the take is screened straight away, together, and people say what they saw, not what they meant to do. This is where the ideas for the next layer appear, often from people who would not have had them by writing: a camera movement that went on too long and that will be redone shorter, or kept because the others saw a breathing space in it; a voice that surprised everyone and that people would like to hear earlier; a contrast between two objects that they would like to bring closer; the sound of footsteps nobody had noticed that could become a motif. The fourth layer is a new improvisation: you take all of this into account without freezing it, you don’t rewrite, you replay, with what you saw in mind. And you start again, as many times as time allows. Two takes are often enough, but four or five produce extremely elaborate, powerful results with an almost organic coherence, because each time you have built on the previous take by listening to it.
A film from 2022, Bounces, shows this mechanism in its pure state. The group had taken photographs the day before. Each person inherited an image taken by someone else (one of them, said to be a failure, showed nothing but traces) and built their part of the sequence shot from this inheritance, combining it with their own images. One participant proposed two readings of the sequence, in one direction the appearance of a figure out of traces, in the other an erasure, and another participant described two images that hide more than they show. None of this had been written: it all came from what had been seen when watching the previous take. In a 2016 film, I exist, the last object to speak was a thread, which said that it had a beginning and an end, but that its end was the beginning of someone else. Nobody had planned that sentence, and it said what the group had just done.
To each person and to the group
The first effect, to my mind the most precious, is a double belonging. In a film improvised in layers, each person did what they wanted in their part; nobody said this idea was good and that one less so; the instructions concerned the framework, and within it freedom was complete. Each person who made the film can therefore make it their own, and so can the group, without anyone being able to say where the boundary lies. When you start from a written script, even one written collectively, you rarely get this: the film resembles the person who wrote it, and the others have merely served them.
People then discover a relationship to form specific to audiovisual work: rhythm, framing, sound and duration are ideas, just as much as a plot twist, and they can be found by doing rather than by thinking. They learn audiovisual language by working the very material of images and sounds, and not by imitating a professional form they do not have the means to reach.
Finally, you experience a group that thinks without deliberating, and I believe this is what people remember longest. Having taken part, for the length of a shot, in a form that went beyond each person and still held together, and having seen the proof of it on the screen ten minutes later, changes the idea you have of what a group can do, and of what you can bring to it without knowing.
Points not to miss
- The framework is technical, not narrative. The instructions concern the protocol, the passing of the camera, the voice, what is off camera, the duration; they can give a theme, never the words. That is the condition for what circulates in the group to pass into the film.
- The place first. Explore before deciding, stop in front of whatever catches the eye, and accept that the film starts from the setting.
- Don’t try too hard to agree during the improvisation. If everyone takes their cue from the first person, the film will have only one mood. You don’t confer, you welcome what the previous person handed on without trying to imitate it, because the diversity of the parts makes the film rich, and coherence will come from something else.
- Watch straight away, and say what you saw, not what you meant to do. Those who filmed listen first to what the others saw, and it is by watching together that you prepare the next layer.
- Replay, don’t rewrite. For the second take, you take the first into account without freezing it, and keep spontaneity alive at each layer. I warn the group that the second take is often weaker if people think they have understood: you have to go for it as hard as the first time.
- Keep all the takes. Each contains things that are not in the others; the group will choose, or keep them all.
- Don’t try to be original. Johnstone’s rule applies to everyone: do what comes to mind first, accept what the previous person started, and the form will come.
- Protect the gap between what you put in and what the others see. When the group reads into the film a construction that nobody decided on, you neither claim it nor deny it. You leave it to the group.
- Accept that it doesn’t work straight away. It often happens that, the first time, nobody dares to get started; you watch that take, draw a starting instruction from it, and begin again. That failure, once watched together, becomes the first layer.
- Stop when the film holds together. Layer upon layer does not mean indefinitely. When the group recognises itself in the film, you write “The End”, as I describe in Écrire le mot fin.
To improvise, in the ordinary sense, is to do without preparing. In the sense I mean here, it is to prepare differently: through the place, through the framework, through watching what you have just done, instead of preparing with words on paper. Writing has not stopped, but you write while shooting, and you no longer write alone.
