In the ritualised silence of an artist’s studio (a painter, a photographer, a sculptor or a filmmaker), works are created. It is patient, generally solitary labour, and the creator, ideally, has no social duties or external pressures bearing down on them. Throughout the history of cinema, a plethora of films, fiction or non-fiction, have tried to show the creative process, and thus taken part in its mystification. Usually, the artist ‘at work’ is filmed in the original creative space, or else in a reconstructed set, or, sometimes, in a film studio. These films, most of them destined for television broadcasting, document the artistic act, but do so by glossing over the original emergence and the maturing process of the work, which typically take place in a remote or religiously minded place. Other, rarer, films present the studio as a centrifugal spot, from which one art (cinema) looks at and reflects upon another art (painting, sculpture and so on).

The studio, the workshop, the atelier stand, in a way, as silent megaphones for these differences, as mirrors that arts use to face one another, that illustrates their dissonances, the gaps that separate them and the similarities that bring them closer.

Objects in the studio spell out the artist’s identity, and the space itself is a cartography of daily habits, precursive experiments of the creative act. The studio is both circumscribed and free, and because the artist’s life takes place in it, the filmmaker can in turn film it and let the creative process unfold. The cutting room plays a similar role for the filmmaker: an enclosed laboratory, a cavern, where, through long and difficult operations, opinions and aesthetic choices are developed and affirmed.