The Limits of Self-Representation: A Conversation on Beatrice Gibson’s “Plural Dreams of Social Life”

A white poodle skittering across a black-and-white tiled dance floor. Two chic women detectives driving a convertible through Paris and Lisbon searching for the same elusive dog. The backlit silhouette of a singer wailing in a smoky room. Grainy home video footage of two flaxen-haired children playing by the shore. Eileen Myles and CAConrad reading poetry and tarot cards in a small living room while Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration plays on a television in the background. These are some of the intimate, dreamlike scenes that proliferate across British filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s two recent 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). 

I Hope is a twenty-minute-long cinematic ode to Gibson’s daughter, Laizer, as well as a double portrait of iconic poets Myles and CAConrad. More explicitly autobiographical than Deux Soeurs, I Hope interweaves voice-over poetry quotations and reflections on politics alongside footage of Myles and CAConrad and home videos from Gibson’s family life. Deux Soeurs, on the other hand, is based on a Gertrude Stein screenplay and follows a gonzo, film-noir narrative structure. In Deux Soeurs’s surreal plot, two women search for a poodle and encounter a cast of mother-like figures along the way, whose stories of life and motherhood are interspersed throughout. 

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead premiered at TIFF in 2018, while Deux Soeurs had its debut in La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes  in 2019. The films share pieces of footage but also key themes relating to motherhood, global politics, feminist subjectivity, and queer poetics. I Hope and Deux Soeurs were shown in an exhibition titled “Plural Dreams of Social Life” at Mercer Union as part of Toronto’s 2019 Images Festival. The installation saw the two pitch-black rooms connected by a short hallway, allowing viewers to hear sounds from one film echoed over the other. 

In the following conversation, friends and colleagues, Katherine Connell and Esmé Hogeveen, discuss their experiences of viewing Gibson’s films at Mercer Union. They grapple with Gibson’s treatment of queerness, feminism, and motherhood, and find excitement in autotheory and the celebration of poets. 

Esmé Hogeveen: On their surfaces, I Hope and Deux Soeurs both claim to be about poetry. Did you read poetry as being their chief concerns? 

Katherine Connell:  I read I Hope as an homage to poetry as a necessary art form in the current political climate, one that exercises criticality and compassion to facilitate new ways of seeing the world. Gibson’s voice-over in I Hope is definitely poetic. Throughout the film, Gibson often shares her own expressive reflections or quotes established poets such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. It’s notable, though, that several of the quotations are not explicitly attributed, so while some listeners may recognize that Gibson is quoting, others may interpret the quotes as part of an original monologue. 

EH: Yeah, the interweaving of quotes in I Hope reminded me a lot of those buzzy, contemporary autotheoretical texts, like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts or Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick. What did you think of poetry’s role in Deux Soeurs? 

KC: While creating a personal archive of feminist poets seems to be the central point of I Hope, I actually found Deux Soeurs’ form more poetic. Since it’s based on a Gertrude Stein script, the film comes off more as an exercise in avant-garde adaptation. Deux Soeurs’ levels of abstraction also reminded me that written poetry often requires multiple readings to fully absorb the meaning. And even still, meaning can transform and hit you differently no matter how many times one has read or listened to a particular poem.    

EH: I have this vision in my mind of I Hope being like an overflowing tub. The film’s direct contents and allusions are so plentiful that they’re practically spilling over. At the same time, however, I found parts of I Hope’s rhythms and internal logic quite murky. For example, the cuts between scenes featuring Gibson’s own family and footage of CAConrad and Eileen Myles hosting a kind of ritual-cum-poetry reading in one of their apartments on the night of Trump’s inauguration. And then there are other scenes that reflect Gibson’s internal monologue more explicitly⁠— her thoughts on family and motherhood, and her fears about our current political shitstorm. 

There’s a lot going on! The imagery is so compelling and lush that rewatching the film, I felt almost overwhelmed by signifiers to the point where I wasn’t able to engage with I Hope’s organization or voice. By comparison, there seemed to be more breathing room in Deux Soeurs, though I did find the Steinian conceit more challenging and sometimes willfully oblique.

KC: I like the tub metaphor⁠ for I Hope because it kind of relates to birthing processes, and maternity is a concept that runs across both films. I Hope centres Gibson’s own maternal identity, whereas, in Deux Soeurs, motherhood is multifaceted and experienced by multiple women. What I appreciate about the latter is that is moves towards a non-essentializing presentation of motherhood. 

EH: Me, too! I read in a MUBI interview that Gibson uses an “improvisational” editing approach, which I assume means approaching documentary and quasi-constructed footage with an open mind as to how the films’ overall structures will unfurl. I don’t know if there was overlap between editing I Hope and Deux Soeurs, but there are definitely visual and narrative parallels.  Did you interpret the films as connected? 

KC: Definitely! On a formal level, I felt Gibson guiding us to connect the films by planting shared footage between I Hope and Deux Soeurs so that they don’t only share concepts but physical spaces, too. 

EH: I really appreciate that both films feature women experiencing rich inner moments while in public spaces, for example on public transit or on a dancefloor.  I Hope opens with Gibson experiencing something akin to a panic attack while riding the London tube: POV shots of the tube are intermingled, montage style, with a series of violent news clips, and we hear Gibson’s voice-over, “My head is thumping. It’s like being in a club.” For me, those lines really summarize the affect of both films. The images during the tube sequence are hyper-saturated, and the camera movements are fluttery—it reminded me a bit of cinematographer Ashley Connor’s style, and the ways in which dreamy sequences can retain grit or a sense of reality when filmed with a handheld camera. I felt like I was watching one of my own panic attacks, haha. 

KC: The smoky filters and lighting in both films made me think that Gibson is interested in fever dreams. Compared to other examples from narrative cinema, where these sequences can come off as contrivedly choreographed or pretty, dreams function as actual experiences within the story-world of Gibson’s films. Sure, sometimes these films are very “pretty” and stylized, but the plot is so weird that the ethereal dream sequences don’t become as predictable as they do in, say, an A24 film. When dreaminess works best or is the most fresh in I Hope and Deux Soeurs is when shots are texturally rough around the edges and seem spontaneous rather than planned, like the sequence on the tube. 

EH: Your thoughts about fever dreams remind me of an interview where Gibson said: “I’m interested in emotion and beauty and in deploying those things critically…I think feeling is a vital category and I don’t think it’s an uncritical one.”(1) I’m wondering how you interpret that quote in light of the autofictive framework of I Hope and its attempts to portray truth or vulnerability. I’m also curious about how you see Gibson’s almost reverential representation of queer poets.

KC: I agree with Gibson that emotion can be used critically, but some of the more urgent emotions in these films are expressed through cliché images. It’s disappointing because we lose a sense of what she’s describing: anger and monstrosity. During the readings, we witness Myles and CAConrad’s expressions of anger and monstrosity in a much more compelling intensity compared to Gibson herself, whose presence as a voice-over narrator or as a blurred trace in largely heteronormative home videos with her husband and children is more withheld.

In a frieze interview, Gibson said that the dance scene in I Hope is about “performing letting go, I had to be totally free and abandon myself.”(2) This quote is interesting because performing letting go implies something very different from being “totally free” and abandoning the self. That final dance sequence is an homage to the final scene in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, so there’s something inevitably contrived about her dance moves because they intentionally replicate another film. I found it challenging to witness a performance that anticipates being watched by a spectator but tries to come off as spontaneous. I’m frustrated by the unresolved tension between performing and actually experiencing sublime, ecstatic feelings which the film links to poetic experience. Here, the most insistently annoying scene for me is the moment that Gibson sits in front of a mirror and applies lipstick all over her face. 

EH: Let’s talk about that moment. We see Gibson alone in her bedroom applying red lipstick, which she then smears all around her face. These shots come on the heels of Gibson quoting Adrienne Rich in voice-over: “A woman in the shape of a monster. A monster in the shape of a woman.” Something about Gibson, an artist seemingly so well-versed in feminist signs and symbols, using the lipstick, apparently unironically, seemed a bit odd to me. The performative drama and then Gibson’s self-aware look into the camera reminded me more of a Grimes music video than a sincere, or new, feminist gesture. More interesting in this scene were Gibson’s preceding voice-over lines considering her relationship to anger. Considering that so much of I Hope contains images presumably from Gibson’s family’s home, reflectiveness about how to repress or express anger in the context of motherhood seemed somehow more genuine than the performance with the lipstick.

KC: It’s a cliche, which made me feel betrayed as a viewer. Like the dance scene, it’s another instance of the filmmaker saying that she’s going to be vulnerable and lay it all bare for her audience but then refusing this connection by producing a generic image. The concept of this shot actually veers towards an old-school condemnation of lipstick as associated with patriarchy and conformity. To me, that’s concerning reduction of the ways people use makeup to self express. This shot of Gibson with the Joker-esque smeared lipstick all over her cheeks and chin—ends with the camera catching her observing her own reflection in the mirror, so it comes across as very arranged. Rather than revealing a socially transgressive, non-normative, or queer person, we are shown monstrosity expressed in a conventional, superficial manner. She’s choosing to express this monstrosity through the image, rather than align herself with subjects who are actually considered monstrous. CAConrad and Eileen Myles can both lay claim to monstrosity, but it’s unclear how Gibson gets to embody that in this film. 

EH: I wonder if there’s something intentionally literal about what’s going on: perhaps Gibson loves poems and wants to showcase some of her favourite poets and poetic techniques in these films. Do you think I Hope and Deux Soeurs speak compellingly to the task of representing poetry in film? 

KC: Well, we’ve been talking about whether the films are tributes to poetry and if they’re meant to replicate the (sometimes) uniquely sublime experience of listening to poetry. Whether or not film can be poetry is a longstanding question with a rich history, one that I see these films engaging unintentionally. In the past, you’ve raised the idea of Gibson presenting the excitement about poets as a fan, especially with reference to her fan letter to Myles in frieze: inherently interesting or cool subjects, who we kind of consider with stars in our eyes. Details like a shaky-cam close-up on CAConrad’s hand shuffling tarot cards capture Gibson’s excitement at being in the same room as them. So even though, in my view, Gibson doesn’t use filmic poetry to effectively capture political crisis, she inadvertently puts together something else. Maybe what these films more successfully capture is that experience of being drawn to poets. 

EH: In I Hope, Gibson says to her daughter: “I wanted to make something… so you could unmake yourself.” The sentimentality of framing a film as a letter to Gibson’s daughter appeals to me, but it also makes me cautious. I’m wondering what you made of the film’s hybrid identity as maternal epistle, a self portrait, and a reflection on poetry and politics. 

KC: I think aligning the heterosexual family with CAConrad and Myles is an odd choice. At worst, it sanitizes the radicality of the poets’ activism and artistry. Despite some beautiful writing in I Hope, I found that Gibson’s use of an autotheoretical method allows her to dodge more incisive reflections on her own identity, relationships, subject position, and the ethics of family in the current world. Moreover, she gives her daughter a very short bibliography of feminist icons to read. Why does Gibson centre such obvious choices and so few of them? Where are the younger poets and the POC poets? 

I see both films engaging more with Modernism and the feminist archive of yore than finding new poetic voices to guide us through contemporary life. I relate to the anxiety and claustrophobia in the films, but I didn’t find that either offered a  productive toolkit for the future, aside from the very general idea of embracing a poetic worldview.  

EH: Totally, and I think that’s maybe why there’s ultimately something more grounding in the lack of resolution or narrative aloofness in Deux Soeurs. Solving a mystery or understanding a poem both involve revisiting scenes and evaluating connections between seemingly disparate “clues.” Deux Soeurs asks the viewer to actively interpret, whereas I Hope seems more about the filmmaker assembling clues that relate to her own identity. I think that kind of autotheoretical project is interesting, but Gibson fangirling for CAConrad and Myles (who are obviously amazing!) felt a bit unimaginative in the end. Like Stein, Myles and CAConrad are part of a well-established feminist milieu. As such, I Hope didn’t feel as experimental or personal as I think it could have. In place of vulnerability, its final dance sequence enacts a dubious catharsis. In the dance scene—the homage to Beau Travail’s finale—we see Gibson dancing with her son to Corona’s Rhythm of the Night. The moment is so fun and stylish, and we desperately want to believe that Gibson’s solved the mystery, but something feels a little too perfect, almost a little manipulative. 

KC: I also felt manipulated because it takes an effective, culminating moment from Beau travail and uses the same music to give a non-narrative film some form of narrative, emotional payoff. Rhythm of the Night is an amazing song—its status as a gay club hit recalls queer dance parties—but Gibson primarily cites Claire Denis, not Corona. In evading trendy references, does Deux Soeurs give viewers something more original to take into the world with them? 

EH: Deux Soeurs reminded me more of the experience of reading an oblique text, like a poem, where you just have to sit with it. Even when reading theory, I find that you have to go to a strange space and puzzle through the text based on a combination of what you’ve read before, your own intuitions about the work, and what you hope to glean from it. 

KC: And doesn’t that speak to Gibson’s own political anxieties and the task of trying to make sense of the world and its myriad unsolvable problems? In the plot of Deux Soeurs, there’s been a crime that you know exists, and you search to uncover it, but its source remains obscured. To me this confusion directly replicates what’s happening in global politics.

EH: Yikes, totally, and I think that’s why I wanted a greater number of voices in I Hope—we need to hear from more people, more poets before we can even begin to try to problem-solve or something.

KC: It’s a film with both good intentions and a predictable chorus of poets. Not entirely a bad thing, but we need more.

Katherine Connell writes about film and culture. She is a staff writer at Another Gaze and has also been published in MUBI Notebook, Canadian Art, Reverse Shot, Reel Honey, and New Statesman. 

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She holds an MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and currently co-facilitates Writing Goop, an experimental writing group, with Emma Sharpe.

Notes:

1. Camden Arts Centre, “Beatrice Gibson on Crone Music at the Camden Arts Centre, 2019,” YouTube, Feb. 6, 2019,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmoUibEKUuU.
2.  Ella Mara de Wachter, “‘Emotion Should Have a Comeback’: Filmmaker Beatrice Gibson on Feminism and Family in Fragile Times,” frieze, January 18, 2019, https://frieze.com/article/emotion-should-have-comeback-filmmaker-beatrice-gibson-feminism-and-family-fragile-times.

This article is published in issue 36.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue