At Night

Sundays and holidays, forests and deserts, are times and places that cinema often visits. For they are times and places where a film can access a deeper truth, allow a crisis to erupt, or stage a turning point in the lives of its protagonists. The night can play the same role: a time and a space of vacancy, where the functional affairs of daily life are put aside, suspended. In Beatrice Gibson’s Paris night, stores are closing and metros are growing emptier. The suspension of functions does not merely precede a moment of rest. It welcomes another world, where life pulsates through meditation. At Night suspends prose, opening up to poetic discourse. At Night performs the vibratory quality of darkness through the tingling images of 16mm film. Such darkness is a canvas that welcomes the painterly and sensuous images captured by Ben Rivers’ camera. In At Night, images are blessing epiphanies.

I have used the word “welcome” twice because Gibson’s film is faithful to Alice Notley’s verse, which appears as the film’s epigraph and in which the word “including” is insistently repeated (At Night is dedicated to the poet, who passed away during the shooting of the film). The Paris night becomes a time and a space of care, where Gibson hosts a polyphony of women’s voices. They bear witness to a plurality of sensibilities around feminist issues. Their strong credibility depends on their being anchored in lived experience, and not just in ideological tenets. In a long spoken sequence that welcomes different languages, we witness a kind of peaceful symposium that works like a caress and could last indefinitely. It is probably this existential layer that makes the feminist dialogue mature. Or perhaps it is the way this dialogue is shot, with the spoken word often left out of frame and the listeners placed at the centre of the image.

At Night is consistent with this out-of-frame aesthetic: an aesthetic of ellipses that places the emphasis on listening, on reception, on what is usually left aside. This is the perspective of the night, which is not just a generic Other – other than the usual, the standard, the normative – but a moment of rumination, maturation and transformation. It is a moment when listening and responsiveness are more important than stating and affirming. Bus and metro stops punctuate the night and signal transition and the possibility of switching directions. In this framework, I found Beatrice Gibson’s presence in the film, with her persistent reflection on the making of the film itself, to be a stumbling block in the river of the night. Her self-centred lament and her body, often reflected in mirrors or glass, seemed to me to be a burden that might hinder the transformative power of the night. She admitted that her presence had not initially been intended but only became urgent later. Why?

One scene appears to me as a kind of key: Beatrice bathing naked in a tub, an image of relaxation as well as of being stuck in an impasse, exposed, defenceless – a duality that is inherent to the night itself. At Night is not content with delivering positive feminist ideas alone, but confesses to a difficulty in truly assuming these ideas: the difficulty of effectively embodying them. At Night wants to be a constructive and problematic film at the same time. The exposure of (actress) Beatrice’s turmoil, then, acts as a necessary obstacle, preventing the film from simply gliding over smooth answers. The film raises at least two problems within the feminist arena: How can the roles of mother and woman – of mother and filmmaker – be reconciled? Can the material conditions of life – and more precisely, the postcolonial structures of power – pre-empt feminist emancipation? These are definitely more than mere symptoms of a midlife crisis. I find it interesting that Gibson does not provide answers, leaving these questions quite open. If the night can be an agent of transformation, one should go to the bottom of its darkness.

In the last part of At Night, the film seems to drift, happily so – a choice that shows brilliant courage on the part of the editor, Liyo Gong, particularly considering that Beatrice Gibson is known to be a formidable editor herself. The protagonist who embodies the postcolonial question, Didi, meets new people, including trans people. Her resentment will be mitigated. Meanwhile, Beatrice watches an exhilarating video of her son dancing. Her sense of guilt at being absent will probably soften. Hardship and tenderness can go hand in hand – which is probably the poetic signature of all of Beatrice Gibson’s films.

The night brings its poetic fruits to ripeness, and the appearance of an owl announces its silent wisdom. Should we speak of poetic sublimation in At Night? Yes, but not in the sense of escaping the matter of life and evaporating into ephemerality, but rather in the sense suggested by Alice Notley’s terrestrial The Descent of Alette (1992), in which Gibson has found an inspiring resonance and in which the underground equals life.