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Watching people work (on creative-process documentaries) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which is half a conversation. [pause] A review is the other half.
• 0:29
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, the documentaries that watch people actually work.
• 0:38
  Ground: Start me on a rooftop. August 6th, 1974. It’s night, and a small group of men are on top of one of the World Trade Center towers, and there’s a security guard coming. [pause] So Philippe Petit and one of his accomplices slide under a tarpaulin to hide from a guard. And they lie there. Not moving. A guard’s boots a few feet away, and above them, strung across the void to the other tower, is the steel cable they drew across, starting with an arrow-shot fishing line and hauling heavier ropes after it. [pause] And what kills me about how Man on Wire tells it — James Marsh shoots the whole thing like a heist. Floor plans, forged IDs, the inside man, the freight elevator. The walk itself, the thing everyone remembers, is almost the anticlimax. The film’s about the six years before it.
• 1:45
  Figure: Six years and more than two hundred reconnaissance visits. He first read about the towers in 1968, in a dentist’s waiting room, when he was seventeen or eighteen and nursing a toothache. An article included an illustration of the towers. [pause] And here’s the detail I’d want on the record before we get sentimental about it. The towers were built to flex in the wind. So Petit strung a two-hundred-foot wire in a field in France and rehearsed simulations of the conditions he’d face. He rehearsed the conditions of the real thing before he could ever stand in them.
• 2:19
  Ground: That’s the thing I want to chase in this whole set of films. Not the walk. The rehearsal in the field. [pause] Because every one of these creative-process documentaries is built on a strange promise — that if you watch someone actually work, you’ll see something the finished piece is designed to hide.
• 2:38
  Figure: Say what you mean by hide. The finished thing isn’t lying to you.
• 2:42
  Ground: It’s not lying. It’s editing. A finished piece presents itself as inevitable — of course it looks like this, how else could it be. And the whole labor that made it, the false starts, the two hundred visits, the guy under the tarp, hiding from a guard, all of that gets squeezed out. The work erases its own making. That’s almost its job.
• 3:06
  Figure: So the documentary’s a kind of forensics. It reconstructs the labor the object deleted.
• 3:12
  Ground: And here’s my suspicion, the one I want to test. What these films actually reveal, over and over, isn’t inspiration. It’s the opposite of the thing we tell ourselves about creativity. They show that the work is mostly rehearsal, procedure, repetition, and managing chaos — and that the moment of genius we came to see barely exists.
• 3:36
  Figure: That’s a strong claim. Let me hold you to it. Because there’s a film in this set that seems built to disprove it — a film where the whole subject is a single flash of a good idea saving the day.
• 3:48
  Ground: Go on.
• 3:49
  Figure: The Five Obstructions. 2003. Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. And before I describe it I have to tell you who these two men are to each other, because that’s the whole engine. [pause] Leth’s the elder — nineteen years older than von Trier, and once his teacher. [pause] In 1967 Leth made a twelve, thirteen-minute short called The Perfect Human. A man and a woman in a white void, doing ordinary things — shaving, eating, lying down — while a detached voice asks questions over the top. How does the perfect human lie down. What does the perfect human think. Von Trier says he’s watched it something like twenty times. It’s his favorite film. [pause] So around 2000 von Trier summons Leth, who’s semi-retired, living partly in Haiti, and gives him a challenge. Remake this little film. Five times. And each time I’ll impose a set of obstructions — rules built to wreck your cool, controlled style. Von Trier’s phrase for the goal is chilling and cheerful at once. He says, I want to banalize you.
• 4:57
  Ground: And the first obstruction is the famous one.
• 5:00
  Figure: Cuba. No set. And no shot longer than twelve frames — half a second, because film runs at twenty-four frames. Plus he has to answer the questions the original only posed. Leth protests. He says it’ll be a spastic film, it’s impossible. [pause] And then he goes and makes it, and comes back delighted, and says the line everybody quotes: the twelve frames were like a gift. The result is this staccato, alive, syncopated thing — better, arguably, than the original. And von Trier is visibly upset. His sabotage improved the work.
• 5:39
  Ground: So you’d say that’s the counterexample to my rehearsal thesis. The obstruction forces a flash of invention, and the flash is the whole story.
• 5:48
  Figure: That’s how the film gets sold, yes. Constraint sparks genius. The twelve frames as gift. It’s become the go-to parable in design schools, in business writing — impose a limit, watch creativity bloom.
• 6:02
  Ground: I don’t buy the way it’s sold. And I want to push on it, because I think the film is smarter than its own reputation. [pause] Here’s what nags me. The twelve-frames-as-gift line gets treated as if the constraint did the work. But the constraint didn’t cut Cuba. Leth did — somebody with decades of filmmaking experience, working with David Holmes’s music underneath it, the same track that later turns up in Ocean’s Eleven. A novice handed the same obstruction makes a mess. The gift only works in trained hands.
• 6:39
  Figure: So you’re saying the constraint’s a catalyst, not the reaction. It doesn’t add ability. It reveals it.
• 6:45
  Ground: More than reveals — it switches on something already built. And the film proves this negatively, which is the part I love. There’s a third obstruction where von Trier, as punishment, offers Leth total freedom. Make whatever you want. And Leth — the man who taught von Trier that rules are necessary — hates it. He finds total freedom detestable. He makes a split-screen film in Brussels, and the critics agree it’s the weakest of the five.
• 7:15
  Figure: Which is the actual argument of the film. Not constraint good. But: a master turns limitation into invention, and without limitation the master has nothing to push against.
• 7:26
  Ground: And that’s why von Trier keeps failing. Read the fifth obstruction. He’s already made the fifth film himself, and he makes Leth put his name on it and read a voiceover letter von Trier wrote — a letter that opens Dear stupid Lars. It’s von Trier confessing that his whole plan was to break Leth down, expose the frightened human under the perverse perfection — and that he failed. Leth just kept turning every obstacle into beauty.
• 7:53
  Figure: Von Trier’s own word for the project’s worth keeping. He says at one point, this is therapy, not film competition. He calls it a Help Jørgen Leth project. The question he’s chasing is, what is Jørgen.
• 8:07
  Ground: And that turns the whole thing away from constraint. The subject isn’t the rules. It’s a temperament that can’t be broken by rules. What the camera catches isn’t a technique — it’s a way of being at work. Serene, unshakeable, converting every attack into material. That’s the thing the finished films never show you. You’d never guess it from Cuba alone.
• 8:33
  Figure: I’ll grant that. But notice what it does to your rehearsal thesis. Von Trier’s a Dogme man. This isn’t a one-off whim. [pause] 1995, Paris. Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg sign the Dogme 95 Vow of Chastity and von Trier throws red pamphlets over a conference audience celebrating a hundred years of cinema. Ten rules. Shoot on location, bring in no props, no added music, hand-held camera only, no special lighting, no genre, and the director must not be credited. [pause] And von Trier’s own explanation of why is the tell. He says the rules are more or less arbitrary. The point is to set self-imposed limits to stimulate the imagination by forcing it to work around obstacles. He even says the Dogme rules were very much made for him — that they’re meant to make the director give away control.
• 9:26
  Ground: That’s a confession, isn’t it. The obstructions aren’t really about Leth. They’re von Trier handling his own fear of the blank page by turning it into a game he can lose.
• 9:36
  Figure: Which is the second thing these films keep doing. The person who imposes the constraint is managing himself as much as the work. The rule’s a device for getting the terrified self out of the room.
• 9:48
  Ground: And that’s not niche film-theory stuff. That pattern shows up everywhere people make things under pressure. [pause] Think of the Oulipo — the writers Queneau and Le Lionnais founded in 1960. Georges Perec writes an entire novel, A Void, without the letter e. Many thought it’d be impossible, or incomprehensible, and some readers finished it without noticing the letter was gone. And the constraint wasn’t a stunt — Perec chose it to stand for the people who disappeared in the war, the absence you can’t name directly. The rule wasn’t limiting his subject. It was the only way into it.
• 10:29
  Figure: And the research backs the shape of this, carefully. There’s a review — the psychologist Patricia Stokes is tied to this line of work — that lands on a U-shaped curve. Too many constraints stifle. Too few breed complacency. The creative gain sits in the middle. It’s not constraint good; it’s the right amount, in the right hands, in the right room.
• 10:52
  Ground: We keep landing on that — the trained person. Which is why I think the constraint story’s a bit of a decoy. The films aren’t really about the rules. They’re about what a trained person does when the rules arrive.
• 11:05
  Figure: Then let’s go to the film where nobody imposed a rule and the person did it to himself, every day, for decades.
• 11:13
  Ground: Jiro.
• 11:14
  Figure: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. David Gelb, 2011. His first feature. And the origin’s instructive — he wanted to make a broad thing, provisionally called Planet Sushi, many chefs, shot like Planet Earth. Then he met Jiro Ono, eighty-five, ten seats, three Michelin stars, in a Tokyo subway station. And Gelb threw out the mosaic and pointed everything at one man and his son.
• 11:39
  Ground: And what the film watches is repetition. That’s the whole content. The same rice, the same cuts, the same routine, refined by a hair. Jiro says it plainly — I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. And Gelb chose Philip Glass for the score deliberately, because Glass is repetitive but it builds on itself and escalates, and he said that’s exactly Jiro’s work.
• 12:08
  Figure: So here the process is the product. There’s no chaos, no obstruction, no jungle. There’s a man who decided sixty-odd years ago what he was, and the film’s the texture of that decision, held.
• 12:21
  Ground: And I want to be careful, because there’s a word the film leans on — shokunin. It gets translated as craftsman, artisan. But that flattens it, and the flattening matters for what the film’s secretly about. [pause] The word’s older than the craft meaning. It comes out of the feudal order — a shiki, a function-bound entitlement, an officeholder. Only later does it drift to mean the craftsman. [pause] And the woodworker Toshio Odate is the one people cite: he says the dictionaries give you craftsman, but the apprentice is taught it means an attitude and a social consciousness. The shokunin has an obligation to work his best for the general welfare of the people. Spiritual and material at once. [pause] So Jiro doing the same thing over and over isn’t obsession the way we’d flatter it in the West. It’s an obligation aimed outward. There’s a related term, shokunin kishitsu — the craftsman’s spirit: pride in the work for its own sake, not fame or fortune. The repetition’s a duty, not a compulsion.
• 13:34
  Figure: And yet the film complicates its own reverence, which is why it’s more than a tribute. The critic Yamamoto introduces Jiro in voiceover — the film mythologizes him before it humanizes him. And the emotional undertow is the son. Yoshikazu, fifty years old, still working under the father, and the film’s real question, unstated, is whether he’ll ever be allowed to be enough.
• 13:57
  Ground: And you notice we never see Jiro’s home. Only the work. The film makes a choice there — the man is the work, there’s no offstage. Which is either the purest thing you’ve ever seen or a slightly frightening thing, and the film lets it be both.
• 14:17
  Figure: Set it against Rams and you get the cleanest contrast in the whole set. Because both are discipline, but they run in opposite directions. [pause] Rams. Gary Hustwit, 2018. Dieter Rams, then eighty-six — the man behind Braun’s products and Vitsœ, and the Ten Principles of Good Design. And where Jiro adds refinement, layer on layer, Rams removes. His motto: weniger, aber besser. Less, but better. The tenth principle is: good design is as little design as possible.
• 14:51
  Ground: And the film’s form tries to obey its subject. Hustwit calls his design films music documentaries — Brian Eno did the score — and the takes are long and unhurried, giving you time to think. He’s trying to make a film that’s itself less, but better.
• 15:12
  Figure: Though the film can’t quite hold its own rule, and the honest thing’s to say so. Critics noticed one sequence — an over-animated run through the Ten Principles — where the restraint breaks. The film about subtraction couldn’t resist adding. Which is almost too perfect.
• 15:29
  Ground: That’s not a flaw, that’s the whole difficulty on display. Subtraction’s harder than it looks. Anybody can add. Knowing what to remove — that’s the discipline the finished object hides most completely, because when it’s done well you can’t see what isn’t there. [pause] And here’s the part of Rams I can’t stop thinking about, because it’s where discipline turns and looks back at itself. [pause] Late in the film he says something devastating for a man who defined an era of products. He says, if I had to do it over again, I would not want to be a designer. There are too many unnecessary products in this world. [pause] Think about what that costs him to say. A lifetime of less, but better — and at eighty-six he looks at the mountain of stuff, some of it descended from his own work, and grieves it. His real principle underneath the ten is the one he states flat: indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is the one and only cardinal sin in design. [pause] So the film watches a master and then watches the master doubt the whole enterprise. And that doubt — that’s the thing the beautiful Braun radio on the shelf can never tell you. The object’s serene. The man who made it is not.
• 16:57
  Figure: And notice the through-line forming, because it’s not constraint. It’s this: every finished thing is calm, and the process that made it is anything but. The object resolves the tension. The documentary un-resolves it.
• 17:11
  Ground: Which is exactly why we need the film about the disaster.
• 17:15
  Figure: Hearts of Darkness. 1991. The making of Apocalypse Now. And the crucial fact of its existence is who shot it. Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s wife, was on the Philippines set in seventy-six and seventy-seven with a camera and a tape recorder, catching behind-the-scenes footage — and private audio, including her husband’s breakdowns. And in 1990, Eleanor Coppola turned that material over to Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, who added new interviews and cut it into the documentary. All three are credited.
• 17:48
  Ground: And the catastrophes are almost comic in their scale until you remember they were real. Lay them out.
• 17:56
  Figure: A typhoon — Typhoon Olga — wrecked the sets in May seventy-six; production shut down, a month of shooting gone. The lead, Harvey Keitel, was replaced by Martin Sheen. Then in March of seventy-seven Sheen, thirty-six years old, had a near-fatal heart attack and, by his own account, crawled a quarter mile to get help — and he initially called it heat stroke, fearing United Artists would panic. Brando arrived heavy and unprepared, paid something like two to three million for roughly a month’s work. And Coppola put his own assets up as collateral; the budget doubled past twenty-five million, and United Artists took out a fifteen-million-dollar life insurance policy on him.
• 18:37
  Ground: A life insurance policy on the director. That’s the studio quietly betting he might not survive his own film.
• 18:44
  Figure: And the confessions on Eleanor’s tapes are the raw core. Coppola says, my greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and I am doing it. And about the ending — none of my tools, none of my tricks, none of my ways of doing things works for this ending. It might be a big victory to know that I can’t do it.
• 19:06
  Ground: Stop on that one. It might be a big victory to know that I can’t do it. That’s not despair, quite. That’s a man finding the edge of his own competence in real time — and the film catches it because his wife happened to be holding the recorder.
• 19:21
  Figure: And the shape of the documentary mirrors the film it’s about, deliberately. It opens on Coppola’s 1979 Cannes line — my film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam — then descends, upriver, into the madness. Life imitating the art imitating the war.
• 19:40
  Ground: Now here’s where I want to resist the romance, because this film gets used as proof that great art needs the artist to nearly die. [pause] And Eleanor’s the one who both supplies that romance and undercuts it. Her narration has the line everyone quotes — you have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side. Beautiful. And also, she’s the one counting the human cost. The strained marriage, the imperiled crew, the brother standing in for Sheen. She’s inside the myth and she’s the auditor of the myth at the same time.
• 20:18
  Figure: So is obsession the engine, or is it just what obsession looks like when it happens to succeed? Because Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece, and so the chaos gets sanctified after the fact. If the film had been the embarrassing thing Coppola feared, the same tapes would be evidence of a man who lost control of a production.
• 20:37
  Ground: That’s the real tension, and I don’t think it resolves. Set Coppola beside Jiro and you have the identical intensity aimed in opposite temperaments — one man in monastic order, one man in the jungle going insane, and both produce something great. Which tells me the chaos isn’t required. It’s one available fuel, not the fuel. Jiro proves you can swap discipline for madness and arrive somewhere just as high.
• 21:06
  Figure: And Petit’s the third temperament, the one that dissolves your either-or. Because Man on Wire is obsession expressed as careful, joyful planning. The near-madness of Coppola and the monastic order of Jiro, fused. More than two hundred visits, and it’s a caper. He says, it’s impossible, that’s sure — so let’s start working.
• 21:31
  Ground: And that line is the whole psychology in eight words. He doesn’t resolve the impossibility. He just moves the impossibility into the future tense and starts. The rehearsal in the field is how you turn a thing that can’t be done into a sequence of things that can.
• 21:50
  Figure: Worth remembering the film’s discipline as an object, too. Marsh never once mentions the towers’ destruction. He said it would be unfair and wrong to infect Petit’s story with it. So the documentary about a wild act is itself an act of severe restraint — it withholds the thing every viewer is thinking about.
• 22:09
  Ground: Which loops us back to hiding. The finished object hides its labor; and sometimes the documentary chooses what to hide too, and the choice is where its taste lives. [pause] But there’s one film left, and it breaks my whole framework, and I want it to, because a thesis you can’t break is just a prejudice.
• 22:30
  Figure: Jodorowsky’s Dune.
• 22:33
  Ground: The film about the film that was never made. Alejandro Jodorowsky, mid-seventies, gets the rights to Dune and assembles what he calls a team of spiritual warriors. H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, the artist Moebius. A storyboard of three thousand drawings covering the entire film. A cast he wanted to include Dalí and Orson Welles. It would have run fourteen hours. And it collapsed — money — with several million still needed. Herbert found that two million of the budget was already spent in pre-production.
• 23:10
  Figure: And Frank Pavich’s 2013 film largely just lets Jodorowsky talk — he’s an octogenarian raconteur, one recruitment anecdote after another. Outwitting Dalí. Wooing Welles with the promise of his favorite chef. And Jodorowsky’s line about the adaptation is unforgettable: I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.
• 23:33
  Ground: So here’s why it breaks my rehearsal thesis. There’s no finished object. The work was never made. There’s nothing that erased its own labor, because there’s no it. And yet — the process outlived the product. It escaped.
• 23:50
  Figure: And here I have to be the auditor, because the film makes a very large claim and I don’t want us to launder it into fact. [pause] The documentary argues the Dune book of storyboards, sent around to studios, seeded Alien, Star Wars, Blade Runner, the Terminator films, The Fifth Element. Now — one part of that’s solid. The personnel chain is real and undeniable: Giger, Foss, Dan O’Bannon, and Moebius largely reassembled on Alien in seventy-nine — Giger designing the creature, O’Bannon writing it, Foss on the ship. That link even skeptics accept. [pause] But the wider claim is contested, and honestly. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com wrote that some effects are undeniable but other chains of influence are impossible to verify, and that at times Pavich strains to make the project seem as central to cinema as it was to Jodorowsky. Inverse singled out the Star Wars claim as hyperbolic — it’s far-fetched to say Lucas couldn’t have made Star Wars without hearing about a failed Dune in 1974.
• 24:58
  Ground: And I’ll happily take the smaller, true version, because it’s stranger and better than the grandiose one. It’s not that Dune caused Alien. It’s that a body of work assembled for one purpose became a well the people who made it drank from for decades. The ideas didn’t need the film. They needed the making.
• 25:22
  Figure: Which is genuinely fatal to the notion that the product’s the point. Here the product’s a void and the process is the entire legacy. Letterboxd’s line for it — a joyful film about failure.
• 25:35
  Ground: And that forces me to revise where I started. I said these films reveal that the moment of genius barely exists — that it’s mostly rehearsal and procedure. And I still think that’s true about the labor. But Jodorowsky shows the flip side of the same coin. [pause] If the finished object hides the labor, then a project that never finishes is nothing but labor — pure, unhidden process. And that’s why it stays contagious. Nothing sealed it up. Three thousand drawings and a room full of people convinced it was real — that conviction had to go somewhere, and it went into everything those people touched next. [pause] So the real revelation of watching people work isn’t constraint, and it isn’t obsession, and it isn’t discipline versus chaos. It’s that the thing we call the work is the residue. The made object’s the part that survives. The living part — the doubt, the rehearsal, the temperament, the conviction — evaporates on completion. These films are the only place you get to see it before it’s gone.
• 26:44
  Figure: And each film catches a different piece of the evaporating part. Leth’s imperturbability. Jiro’s obligation. Rams’s late doubt. Coppola’s it might be a victory to know I can’t. Petit’s let’s start working. Jodorowsky’s conviction with no object. None of that is legible in the finished thing — the sushi, the radio, the movie, the walk.
• 27:09
  Ground: And it makes me wonder about the everyday version, the one that isn’t a masterpiece. Everyone’s finished something — a meal, an email, a room they tidied — and then looked at it and felt that quiet erasure, where the labor’s already invisible and the thing just sits there looking like it was always going to be that way.
• 27:31
  Figure: The object forgets whoever made it. Almost the moment it’s done.
• 27:36
  Ground: So maybe what these films are really for isn’t inspiration and isn’t instruction. It’s witness. Somebody stood there with a camera while the making was still happening, before it sealed over — and refused to let the labor disappear the way labor always disappears.
• 27:54
  Figure: Petit, at the end, has the sentence they build the whole film toward. Life should be lived on the edge of life. Refuse to tape yourself to rules, refuse your own success, refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge — and then you’re going to live your life on a tightrope.
• 28:18
  Ground: And the strange thing is he says that, and the film we just watched is two hundred reconnaissance visits and a wire shaking in a field. The edge he’s talking about was reached by the most patient, procedural, un-romantic labor imaginable. The tightrope was the culmination of six years of planning.
• 28:39
  Figure: So the edge and the rehearsal aren’t opposites. The rehearsal is what earns you the edge.
• 28:45
  Ground: That’s where it settles for me. We go to these films to watch genius, and what we actually get to see is the enormous, invisible amount of un-genius that genius is made of — and how completely the finished thing conspires to hide it.
• 29:01
  Ground: If the making is the living part and the finished thing is only what survives it, then what are we actually looking at when we admire a completed work — the achievement, or the gravestone of the process that made it?