Beatrice Gibson: Connecting Poetics and Politics

by Vida Kashani

Beatrice Gibson (1978) is a French-British artist and filmmaker, originally from London and currently based in Palermo. Her current artistic practice concerns politics, feminism and poetics of everyday sites and spaces. Recently, her films have become more biographical and with a global perspective. Working with diverse mediums—from performance, to video, to text—her films are improvised, experimental and collaborative in nature. Her inspirations come from research-based practice and through making new friends via collaborations framed by the context of her practice.

Gibson is twice-winner of The Tiger Award for Best Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival, in 2009 and 2013 respectively. In 2013, she was shortlisted for both The Jarman Award for artist filmmakers and the 2013–15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. In 2015, she won the 17th Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel. Most recently, she was the 2019 winner of the Images Festival Marian McMahon Akimbo Award for Autobiography as well as being shortlisted a second time for the 2019 Jarman Award for artist filmmakers.

Being born and raised in a French-English middle-class family in London has influenced her to describe herself first as a European and second as a Londoner. As an artist she does not like being put in one box, and having two cultural backgrounds gives her the opportunity to describe herself in another way. Gibson received a BA degree in Philosophy and after graduating she lived abroad where she met other artists and creatives which can be considered as the dawn of her artistic career. According to Gibson her practice as a filmmaker started while following her Master and PHD program. Her films are both experimental and script-based, mostly depending on the project. According to Gibson the reason why she got interested in filmmaking is because she is fascinated by the idea of making research-based works that are not necessarily text, she likes to manifest in other ways. Another reason why she likes it is that each film has its own challenges that lead her to explore new aspects of the vast world of filmmaking. At the beginning of each project she feels like a “total novice”, mainly because the projects are each time different, although she can identify a trajectory and a process that she recognizes. For the past decade she has drawn on strategies from modernist and experimental composition and writing. Her new films expand this range of influences to include a distinctly feminist lineage and feature poets C.A. Conrad, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley alongside a cast of performers and artists who are also her friends.

Gibson is an artist who always collaborates with other creatives to make films. Collective and shared experiences with the people she likes is an important part of her professional life. Sometimes, she uses filmmaking as an excuse to make new friends and work together. She loves working in crews so she does not spend all her time alone just projecting her own perspective. Next to working with other artists, she has also worked on her first three short films with her partner, Nick Gordon, an amazing and talented director and DOP. According to Gibson, her husband has always been involved in her films in one way or another but, since she tended to work independently and explore more, she tried not to always work with him.

The social and community aspect has always been visible in her works but the perspective has shifted. The sparks of these changes began with Gibson having children, especially when she was pregnant with her daughter. During her pregnancy, she became aware that all her sources are coming from Western white male perspective and since then she has become conscious of her choices which has shifted her frame of reference. This shift is vivid in her two latest short films, Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019) and I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018). They are both still looking at community and cultural perspectives but through a different lens: namely, that of femininity.

The Two Poets project came from Gibson being more conscious about feminist figures in relation to her practice. She started making these films as a result of Brexit and the election of Trump as US president. At the time, she was constantly reading the newspapers, which brought her anxiety. She decided to read poetry instead which inspired her to make a film about two poets, but in the end this also opened up a feminist world. Her film Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (or Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters) (2019), conveys the fragile, complex, and emotional condition of our moment in time. Shot on a combination of 16mm film and digital video, the work is basically about two women in a car around Paris, looking for their poodle dog. It is also a portrait of the people in it because the cast members were all Gibson’s friends who she recalls as “great individuals, artists and poets”. The story is about two women, two cars, two poodles; it is about repetition and representation, doubling and copying. It is based on an original screenplay by Gertrude Stein but given the feeling of a thriller. Stein’s story is all about herself but in a very formal, very fictionalised and very structural way. So that story is also, ostensibly, just a portrait of herself and her lover driving through Paris. The making of the film was open to experiments, time, and research. The experimental approach of the director thus was at its highest. According to Gibson she first shot some material before later perceiving that she didn’t have enough to show the individual portraits the artists should come out with. After spending a couple of months pulling back all the elements, she decided to film more personal material for everyone of them. The extra time she spent on the film came to be a gift as, while she was working, two of the actresses became pregnant and so, alongside all the other doubling, there were then two babies as well.

Gibson’s other film, called I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) is a personal reflection of motherhood in uncertain times. The film is developed with American poets C.A. Contrad and Eileen Myles on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in February 2017. The title is taken from a poem by C.A. Conrad, which indicates that one possible answer to the crisis of confidence is futurity. The film juxtaposes found footage from the mass refugee migration across the Mediterranean, the Grenfell Fire in London, and the consequences of political upheaval and war, along with deeply intimate images of Gibson’s family, domestic life and herself. Aiming to seek the power of ritual, she casts the poet as a prophet who will cross a different path in a time of perilous authority. The film ends with a woman and a masked child (Gibson and her son) on screen, standing in a hall of mirrors and throwing their bodies around the room, enacting Denis Lavant’s dance at the end of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999).

The films I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) and Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters) (2019) evoke a sense of confusion and anxiety in the face of world events, but they also celebrate the transformative capacity of family and the tenderness of collective living. At the moment, Gibson is working on two feature films, which is something completely new to her — her previous works being all short films and not based on traditional scripts. She is now working on a script and trying to understand whether the way she usually works and puts a film together can be expanded into a longer time frame. One of the films has been commissioned by the BBC and is a love story inspired by Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. The other one is an adaptation of Euripides’ Alcestis, co-directed by her partner Nick Gordon in Sicily. The character of Alcestis was the first female mortal to undertake an epic journey and go to the underworld. It is a portrait of Gibson choosing to relocate to another country.

The idea of the film happened with the start of the pandemic while she was homeschooling her kids. After a week of being with the kids, she was done with the situation, something she felt brought only conflicts. Instead she decided to do experimental film school with them.

It was her son Odie who suggested to make a Greek Tragedy. She spent her time in the pandemic on Zoom looking for casting, which gave her the motivation and drive to get through the lockdowns. Being in contact with people by phone allowed for more casual and intimate conversations.
Both of these new films will premiere sometime in thesummer/autumn of 2022.