2.10.2022

The 33 Project

Good morning. It’s been a complicated week for me personally. In times like this, when things are unsettling and I feel disoriented, I’m thankful for creative outlets like my substack. Just a brief thank you to the people that read and share this project. It’s small, but meaningful to me.

Ok, on to the recs for the week:

1/ My favorite filmmaker, Céline Sciamma, was profiled in the New Yorker recently and it was a wonderful read, of course. The piece by Elif Batuman does an excellent job exploring Sciamma and art impacting sexuality and sex.

A few takeaways for other artists:

1. Pay more attention.
2. Be strong enough to not do what you don’t want.
3. Knowing something is possible is enough. We can change.
4. Change things from the inside — be bold and different and make your reality other peoples reality.
5. Pics or it didn’t happen.

I also loved these two passages:

It was revelatory, Sciamma explained, to learn that her own grandmother had first been “struck by female desire — by her own desire,” not just in a movie theatre but “in front of a film made by a woman.” Carla had been “a woman really connected to her own desire,” and there was no doubt in Sciamma’s mind that this early encounter at the cinema had been formative: “The female gaze saved that little girl.”