Welcome to the 132nd issue of Subtle Maneuvers, my fortnightly newsletter on wriggling through a creative life. If you’re able to support the newsletter with a paid subscription, it means a lot a lot a lot—thank you!
Céline Sciamma (b. 1978)
Last time, I wrote about how the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari developed a method of working together that Deleuze called “the flux.” He explained it like this: “We didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us.”
I love this idea—and I promised that, in this issue, I would propose a method of creating “the flux” in an individual practice. So here it is: The method I was thinking of comes from a 2022 New Yorker profile of the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma by Elif Batuman, which I read recently thanks to a link in Batuman’s newsletter,
(which I’ve been savoring and highly recommend!).Sciamma is a screenwriter and the director of five feature films, probably best known for 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Batuman’s profile of her is absolutely worth reading in its entirety—but the part I want to focus on is when she describes Sciamma’s screenwriting process:
Sciamma begins work on a screenplay by drawing up two lists: a “desired” list, of the images and the lines that made her want to make the movie in the first place, and a “needed” list, of the scenes necessary to advance the plot. She then merges the lists, mapping the desired elements onto the needed scenes. She used to make a point of shooting any leftover needed scenes. Now she just crosses them off. By following this procedure, she says, you can end up “in a position where you have two scenes you want, without the bridge you need.” Confronted by such chasms, in the absence of bridges, Sciamma has discovered new ways of cutting, new rhythms, and new narratives.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Deleuze and Guattari discovered a way of working that was “like two streams coming together to make a third stream.” Sciamma’s process achieves something similar, I think, through this clever use of dueling lists.
In a 2020 lecture, Sciamma explained a bit more about this process:
Technically, this is how it works: It is about having two files open on my laptop. Two lists. The first list is very free. It’s a list of ideas for scenes, sometimes just images, a line of dialogue. They have no connections one with another, and often no connection yet with the plot of the film. . . .
The other file is a list of scenes you need, the steps that are inevitably building the story. . . . Those scenes seem much simpler to actually write, because they belong, they are needed. But actually my work is all about making them belong to the other list. They must become desired. Every single one of them. My rule is that not a single scene must stay on the “needed” list.
This approach especially resonated with me because working on a nonfiction book (yes, I’m still working on mine; no, I don’t know when it will be done—I wish!) sometimes feels like tackling a never-ending “needed” list. But, as a reader, I can often tell when a writer was just checking things off this list. Those books feel excessively dutiful, like the author simply made a sensible plan for the book and then . . . executed it. Who wants to read that?
Sciamma suggests that the “needed” material has to be animated by desire. Otherwise it’s not needed! If you take this approach, she said in 2020, “it actually helps you be brave and depart from the comfort of a solution that has been tested, that works, and that feels reassuring.” She continued:
It makes you depart from convention. The hard part of that process is that when you go along with the convention and the rules of storytelling, you feel you are writing. It looks like you are writing, because it’s efficient and understood. It takes a strong will to go deep. You have to accept the fact that you are choosing unsatisfaction for a while. You are not writing, you are thinking about writing.
I love that second-to-last line: “You have to accept the fact that you are choosing unsatisfaction for a while.” Might that, in fact, be an alternate definition of “the flux”—finding a way to choose unsatisfaction for as long as it takes to arrive at a new solution, rather than defaulting to the conventional, the reassuring, the familiar? And when projects don’t fully succeed—when they feel overly dutiful or just half-baked—is it because their creators didn’t choose unsatisfaction for long enough?
Of course, it’s easier to do this when you have someone else in it with you, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s intense but weirdly effective collaboration. (Remember that Guattari was never able to write anything substantial on his own, prior to pairing up with Deleuze.) For those of us working solo—well, I’ve written about mantras before, and this could be a new one to fall back on: “You are choosing unsatisfaction for a while.”
MORE FILMMAKERS’ PROCESSES
From the archive:
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> You have to accept the fact that you are choosing unsatisfaction for a while.
I'm just going to apply this to my whole life.
@Mason Curry At the beginning of one of those "can I really do this?" project moments, this quote, this post, this mantra really helps. “You are choosing unsatisfaction for a while.” Thank you.