Design principle: improvisation with available materials and means—no master plan. Typical of low-budget production and European auteur cinema (Godard, Varda).
Bricolage
When you realize on set that the planned shot isn't working with the available resources — and you still manage to create something usable — you're doing bricolage. The principle isn't managing scarcity out of necessity, but a conscious artistic strategy. You work with what's there: a broken lamp becomes a light source with its own quality, an error in the camera creates a motion blur that fits atmospherically, an improvised edit cuts scenes together so that the jumps themselves become a statement.
Godard elevated this to a principle — not solely due to lack of money, but because he considered the revelation of craftsmanship, visible improvisation, to be more authentic than the polished feature film. This is the crucial point: bricolage is not a makeshift solution that needs to be hidden, but an aesthetic that shows the traces of its making. Agnès Varda shot her early films similarly — with friends, a tiny budget, but with the freedom to make every decision spontaneously and to make the camera an observer rather than an instrument of a finished plan.
In practice, this means: you plan fewer shots in advance, keep the crew small and flexible. You use locations as they are — no sets, no rebuilding. Actors improvise dialogue or movements, the sound assistant improvises holding the boom mic in the right direction. In the edit, you don't cut for dramatic smoothing, but leave editing errors, jump cuts, and sound surges in place if they serve the story. Every decision becomes transparent — the viewer sees that this film was made, not that it just happened.
This has nothing to do with sloppiness. It's a control over chaos. You need a strong visual and narrative instinct to know which coincidence works and which just appears unintentionally funny. Modern streaming productions and indie films constantly draw on this principle — not because the budget is low, but because the freedom leads to faster, more intuitive decisions. The difference between bricolage and mere dilettantism lies in the intention and artistic control.