The late American poet Alice Notley's work feels like a continuous act of defiance against the limits poetry tries to place on itself. Across decades, she carved out a voice that was at once intimate and insurgent, folding grief, feminism, myth, and everyday survival into sprawling, incantatory lines that refused neat containment. Her poems often read like conversations overheard from another dimension—raw, restless, and fiercely protective of the inner lives women are told to quiet. Notley's commitment to pushing past convention made her a lodestar for poets who see the page not as a boundary but as a site of ongoing rebellion, where language can be remade in the image of a life lived uncompromisingly.
Notley's work—particularly her epic poem The Descent of Alette—underpins Beatrice Gibson's feature debut At Night, which was presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart in 2024 and screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday and Tuesday. Gibson established herself as a filmmaker through several experimental shorts, including IFFR Tiger Award winner The Tiger's Mind, and it's mildly surprising to find that, for all its experimental form, At Night has been placed in the LFF's Dare strand. That said, the film is a more accessible work than what is typically found in the festival's ever-fascinating Experimenta section.
True to its title, At Night is a nocturnal odyssey through a Paris in which the bulk of its residents appear to have turned in for the evening. It's a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop against which a number of women voice their hopes and fears. One such woman, filmmaker B—deftly played by Gibson herself—is visiting Paris to scout for locations for an upcoming project. While in the French capital, B attempts to contact her old friend Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who once worked for B as a childminder; Didi lives in Belleville—where B is looking at potential locations—but appears to have been ghosting B for quite some time.
Gibson's film, which is wonderfully photographed (in 16mm) by Mare's Nest director Ben Rivers, opens up to include the stories of other women, such as Sophie Robinson's poet, who, in one of At Night's most striking scenes, recites one of her works to a roomful of people. It is safe to assume that Robinson—like Gibson and the other women featured in this slippery film—is playing a once-removed version of herself. The poetry of Notley, who died during production, is heard via a voiceover she recorded especially for this project after she became too ill to fulfil her planned onscreen role. As such, Notley is a ghostly, ethereal presence, one who always seems to hover around the edges of this beguilingly original piece of autofiction.
