The Poetry of Non-Compliance: A Conversation

Beatrice GIbson, At Night, (still), 2026

Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature film At Night—shot by Ben Rivers on 16mm and inspired by the writings of Alice Notley, Kathy Acker, and June Jordan—follows a group of women as they tessellate across a single Parisian night. Anchored by the character of the filmmaker (played by Gibson herself), we encounter these various women in animated bar time discussion, alone together in the metro, gathering at poetry readings, concerts, and kebab shops, and see them all journeying ever more inwards as the night deepens in its introspection. Though recognizably informed by the open-form, aleatory method of her celebrated short films (including I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead and The Tiger’s Mind), At Night also signals something of a departure for Gibson, taking her filmmaking into a more contemplative, oneiric place in which easy binaries and received understandings dissolve.

George MacBeth met with Gibson in the fierce mid-August heat of the Locarno Film Festival—where At Night had its world premiere and she went on to win the Best Emerging Director Award—to discuss mid-life revelations, fear of the dark, indeterminacy, non-compliance, and how to mediate our “fucking complex times” into film. 

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George MacBeth: At Night takes place, as its title suggests, during a single night in Paris. I wanted to ask you about this choice of time and place. From the Symbolists onwards, the “Paris nocturne” became a highly worked-over territory for modernist art, poetry, and film. It’s a fascination we can find in French painting from Monet and Pissarro on through to the wet cobblestones of Marcel Carné and the “poetic realists,” recurring in Jean-Pierre Melville, Leos Carax, or Claire Denis’ Friday Night (2002). In French poetry the hinterland of the Parisian night is also a fixture in Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Surrealists. I felt, however, that your film was trying to temper or transmit a different representation of the nocturnal urban experience?

Beatrice Gibson: That’s a beautiful question. At Night could be seen as a kind of feminist flaneur film I suppose—a flâneuse film. In reality, choosing to shoot the film in Paris actually had very practical, less romantic reasons behind it. Two members of the cast, Diocouda Diaoune (Didi in the film) and the poet Alice Notley, were there. One is a single working-class mother and the other was elderly so both of them needed us to come to them in order to participate. That’s the real reason it’s shot in Paris. 

Setting the film at night did, however, have a more conceptual rationale behind it, again partly to do with Alice. The film is inspired by her book-length poem The Descent of Alette—which is also a sort of gender-flipped epic.1 Alette is a poem about an epic journey, but its protagonist is a woman, not a man. It’s an amazing poem written entirely in quotation marks and has the effect on the reader of making you breathe it as you read it. You sort of trip as you accompany the protagonist on her trip. It’s mind-blowing. Alice’s poem flips the epic form in so many radical ways, really —it proposes, for instance, the complete opposite of going up: into rationality, the enlightenment, logic, the sciences and all that—

GM: Into Haussmann’s boulevards… 

BG: Yes. Instead, it goes down into the depths, the oneiric and the unconscious, towards interiority and the self. Alice spoke about that a lot. Like, why is it that we don’t look inside ourselves for answers? Why do we always look to rationality, fact, and science? Maybe our inner worlds are also a valid place for the production of knowledge? The film explores the night as a kind of heightened emotional space, with all this at the back of its mind. 

GM: It is when we write our diaries, when we recollect. 

BG: Exactly. It’s a space of contemplation but also a scary space, a space of the unknown. Children are afraid of the night; I’m afraid of it, afraid to walk home in it. Afraid of being mugged or attacked. But, at the same time, it’s also a place of ecstasy and emancipation, you dance and get high in it. It has all these amazing and varied dimensions. The film explores the night as a space of transformation and as a space of learning.

GM: You’ve previously said that this film takes the form of a question, and I’m curious what this question, as you see it, might be?

BG: I think At Night asks multiple questions. I think fundamentally it’s a kind of mid-life crisis film. But again, flipped—into something like mid-life revelation. At Night has a wandering, searching logic, which is set up by the character of the filmmaker—my character—who in some ways is a McGuffin: a device to trigger this searching, questioning logic, which then provides the editorial structure or core existential impulse of the film. The central question of the film is quite simple to my mind: What is the best way to be, to exist, inside the particular (particularly crushing) historical moment that find we ourselves? How should we be in relation to it? How should I be in relation to it and in relation to others? What is the right way to be within all these crushing polarities and asymmetries?

GM: This connects to something else that jumped out to me, which is that the classic flaneur is usually a lone man in the swarming crowd, the stark individual—an untethered, and accordingly alienated, figure. And I felt your film rather counters this with the sense that the night is a space, like you’re saying, of social responsibility and transformation, but also of chance encounters and serendipitous meetings. I wondered whether you were also seeking to charge or to gender this traditional artistic depiction of the night? To give it a different phenomenology?

BG: I think so, yes very much so. The man alone versus the woman in relation is key really. The phenomenological aspect of all this is so interesting to me too. Most nighttime movies, in a more mainstream cinema context, would probably capitalize on the night as a state of mind in which something terrible is always lurking at the edges, like it’s going to happen. Something bad’s going to happen, right? This person’s eventually going to be killed or robbed or raped or whatever, so yeah, I’m definitely trying to not comply with that expectation and to again flip the nocturnal into this more transformative space, a kind of no-action, present-tense space of feeling and encounter. And that has everything do with a kind of minutia, with the daily, the quotidian and the subjective.

Beatrice Gibson, At Night (still), 2026.

GM: Returning to Notley’s poem, I was thinking about how in The Descent of Alette every poetic phrase is enclosed within these quotation marks. And how At Night also has enclosed within it various works by other artists and performers, including performances by Lily McMenamy and Adam Christensen, as well as poetry readings by Sophie Robinson, June Jordan, and of course Notley herself. These are in the film, I feel, not just “citationally.” Rather, all of these performances seem embedded into the lifeworld of your characters. For instance, on her Metro ride home Didi watches a June Jordan reading on YouTube and draws some sort of succor from it. Could you say more about this relation to pre-existing creative material in your films?

BG: I get very obsessed with the material or people I’m citing or working with. I tend to go quite deep. The films of mine that feature poets aren’t just portraits or documents of those poets reading poems. The films explore the methods of those poets in their own construction. I’m fascinated by form, by poetic form—by poetic methodology and process, and that fascination spills over into the films themselves. At Night doesn’t just feature Alice’s poem, it uses its formal conceits. So yes, Alice is in the film in a very embodied way. She was actually going to be in the film more literally, but she got sick. She wrote to me saying “I’m not well. You need to just come and record me reading poems.” It’s possible that the recordings in the film are the last living recordings of Alice reading The Descent of Alette. It’s quite emotional really. She was a friend, and I miss her.

GM: Her voice sort of takes us into the film, as she provides a voiceover during the tunnel sequence that takes us underground and then out of it again.

BG: She’s a key character really. Another one of the six, seven, eight…nine women in the film (laughs)! The endless multitude. I actually really love the effect that the constellations of women and feminist references being quoted, as you put it so beautifully, has, via phones and screens. It feels very contemporary in a way I hadn’t planned or anticipated. The characters are all quite alienated in some ways, but they’re always in a crowd, via devices. A relational crowd of friends, family, and influences, both dead and alive, and these figures all enter the film via the phone and the TV. It’s quite beautiful, a little melancholic even. Screens, phones—they were a way for me to limitlessly extend the constellations in the film, in both concrete and abstract fashion, both vertically and horizontally, let’s say. One of my favorite shots features Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s amazing film The Cloud in Her Room (2020) playing on the TV in a restaurant. I love the way her film, her characters and mine, bleed together in that scene, the dialogue of The Cloud mixing with the dialogue of the diners in At Night.

GM:  You used the term “constellation.” I was also thinking about the composition of the film in terms of a sort of musicality, a syncopated rhythm, governing how the different women who we follow through the night pass in and out of synchronicity with each other. You have these moments of harmonization and then moments of a kind of dissonance or discordance, such as the quite charged discussion scene between your character (the filmmaker) and Didi in the night supermarket.

BG: I made a lot of films about experimental modernist composition and male composers early on in my practice. And later those interests got parsed through a more specifically feminist lens. I think I make things very collectively and in a very aleatory and open-ended way. I have right from the start. I’ve always been interested in how experimental compositional processes could be applied in the process of making a film. For At Night, we set up a kind of intersectional collective production process. The characters in the film play themselves and wrote their own material. There were two principal references behind the script: Alice’s poem The Descent of Alette and Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986)—a book in which a woman has an abortion and then wanders around kind of on an epic quest. So, the basic structure of the script, the idea behind it, was a woman, or multiple women really, on an epic journey through the night. My idea was to fill that space with women talking, so within that structure or frame the characters wrote their own material, wrote what they wanted to say. Denna Cartamkhoob (development producer) and I devised a range of questions to kickstart the process, “consciousness-raising” questions about money, sex, work, life, love. Questions like: have you had an abortion? Can you relate an ecstatic experience (sexual or non-sexual)? Do you have a poet or writer or a literary reference that you would like to read something from? They were partly influenced by another amazing book called Talking to Women by Nell Dunn.2 So to circle back to your question, I think the musicality is in the method. It’s quite an experimental process in a way, and to me one quite rooted in and quite connected to my interest in experimental composition. I’ve always been interested in processes that contain, or open themselves to, different kinds of collectivities.

GM: This is your first feature film, with a larger budget than your previous works, and I imagine with that there come different constraints. Did you find that continuing to pursue this collegiate, collaborative, and I suppose experimental, method was thereby challenged, or harder?

BG: Harder I suppose. On a structural level, for example, a feature needs a protagonist, or it needs someone that maybe looks like a protagonist. So, from the outset, there was quite a lot of tension in that, because I didn’t want to have a protagonist; I wanted to make a choral film, like my previous films, about multiple women. Finding money for that is challenging. But collectivity is formally challenging too. You do need something, there needs to be some capitulation to narrative, to lead you through the space and time of an hour and a half. So, there was always this deliberation, or formal tension around that issue. The intersectional nature of the process also brought up quite a lot issues—around race and class. Varying tensions and asymmetries reared their heads, tensions that were real and complex. The only way I could think of to confront them was to use the tools in front of me—so I proposed that we write a scene representing them, to try to stay with the trouble as it were. This is the reason I ended up in the film. Diocouda and I sat down on the last morning of the principal shoot and with the help of Sophie Robinson, who is an incredible writer and poet, we wrote the shop scene together. My character, the character of the filmmaker, subsequently became a means to explore one of the films central questions: Can we inhabit the world through shared experiences or not? The fact that we perhaps cannot—in the violence of this particular moment—makes the film quite melancholic. The film doesn’t really suggest answers or solutions, it doesn’t try to resolve things that aren’t resolvable, it’s very open. Liyo Gong (editor) and I worked for months on this lack of resolution. It was extremely important to us.

GM: I appreciated the candor of this decision a lot—the refusal to shy away from these disequilibria of class and race.

BG: I think we live in fucking complex times, and I wanted to make a complex film. I feel I see so much work that is often two-dimensional, and I don’t find it that helpful. I wanted to make something more unresolved, you know, a film in the shape of a question, a film that opens and refuses to close things down in a two-dimensional way. I read this quote by Joan Didion recently, in a book by Emily Labarge called Dog Days.3 The first part of the quote is famous, something like “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But Labarge also points out the second, often omitted, and kind of more interesting, part of Didion’s quote, that: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of choices. We live entirely, by the imposition of a narrative line upon desperate images, by ideas we have learned in order to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria of our actual experience.”4 I find it amazing. The idea that narrative is predicated on closure, and closure is comprehension, and somehow also ownership and control—a way to package things so we can deal. Alice comes into it here also for me (Alice always comes into it in the end). She was firm believer in “non-compliance.” She used to say the job of a poet was all to do with non-compliance. Non-compliance with government, with the state, with narrative form, poetic factions, but she also applied it her own thinking. The idea that even our thinking can be a cage and that we should constantly question ourselves and our beliefs.

GM: Do you think you’ll continue to work in features now?

BG: I think so, yeah. I will. About a month ago, I might have told you that I was never going to make another film again because I was so destroyed by this process. Making films is violent. It really is. It’s hardcore. But it’s also instinctive to me. I love it, it’s what I do and I can’t stop doing it.