This brief film is part of a larger project of the same title (Leisure, Utopic), a “free” adaptation of Utopia, a book published in 1984 by the American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), a leading member of the New York School. Could you start by telling us what drew you to this book, to Bernadette Mayer?
Bernadette Mayer’s book was introduced to me by a friend, the curator Mason Leaver-Yap, back in 2019. I immediately fell for it. It’s a slim red volume, self-published and self-funded… a feminist riposte to the epic utopian texts of male culture. Grand ideas find a different form here, they refer to the daily and the quotidian, are articulated through and by friends, family, and Mayer’s wider community. This is the kind of Utopia I want to dream. Present tense and attainable as opposed to remote and immense. Mayer’s book feels like a position, or rather a practice, a manual for being and existing in the now.
From a visual point of view, the film is in two parts. In the first, we see your son reading a typed text on a page under your gaze and direction. Why have a young boy read this text today? What prompted you to place yourself and your son at the heart of this adaptation?
The material for the film was shot by my partner, in relation to another project we were working on together, back in 2020. It was the beginning of the pandemic, an equally fraught and intense moment and we were locked inside, the world around us crumbling. Mayer’s Utopia was playing on my mind and I thought of this scene. Very simply, a small child reading about a better world. The scene never made it into the film, but we did shoot it and the footage was beautiful. Earlier this year, I dug it out. The live-streaming of women and children dying on my phone, the anxiety of a collapsing present had reached another all time high. I felt desperate and wanted to counteract it somehow. Mayer’s book is itself littered with children imagining a better world; a sixth Grader writes a letter from the future and her own daughter’s musings also feature: “I’m going to make dinner for all the people in the world, the sun will come but it won’t melt the food, the clouds will sit quietly at the table without raining, the moon will come but it won’t get too dark.” Making the film was cathartic – I did it for me.
The second part shows the end of a meal in a garden, a child (your son again?) wearing a spectacular white fur mask that hides his face. In both parts, the principle of play, joy and pleasure dominates: Leisure, utopic? Is leisure the true condition of utopia, if we consider it, as in Bernadette Mayer’s book, as internal to language?
The second part of the film is my actually daughter, goofing around in a mask we made. It’s joyful and playful. She is carefree. The phrase Leisure, Utopic comes from Mayer’s book. The idea of being carefree, of leisure, the idea of a place where work isn’t at centre of culture, but instead feeling is, is something the book touches on a lot. I’m interested in that from a political point of view. I’m interested in the idea of a pleasure politic as defined and expanded on by black feminists such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Maree Brown. It’s complicated (or possibly all the more urgent) for me to talk about the politics of pleasure as I’m a privileged white woman with much more access to it than most. Connected to this, economic justice has been a particular preoccupation of mine of late. What could or does a just economic world actually look like, a world where universal basic income is a human right, where non extractive economics and equitable re-distribution of wealth are key principles. How can these ideas apply to my own resources? How can we dream a world into existence in which pleasure is accessible, across class race and gender divides? Mayer’s book imagines exactly this, calling on children, lovers, strangers, friends, the living and the dead to help her articulate alternative models. Utopia is amazing precisely because it offers a toolkit for navigating the metaphysics of life under colonial capital, placing intimacy, tenderness, and community at its heart.
The free adaptation here concerns chapter 4 of Utopia: “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on”. It’s obviously free, since we hear about Twitter and Instagram in a text published in 1984. How did you establish the text we hear?
The text was reworked by my son and I as we read it back in 2020. It’s freely edited in that sense, and the scene has a pedagogic dimension. We discussed the world it proposed as we read it. I hated my relationship to social media in 2018 and I struggle even more with it in 2024. I can concede it has a mobilizing dimension, but it’s not a place for actual discourse. To me, it is a mirage, everything is flattened out and relationality is holographic. Back then, my son hated it too – it took his mother out of the room. He and I decided we’d be better off without it.
Several of your films are dedicated to American women poets (I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, Deux Soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs, ainsi que For CA, For Eileen). What draws you, as a filmmaker, to these women? What’s the need to bring cinema to bear on their work?
I fell into this community of poets (both women and non-binary people) by reading them feverishly during a time of acute political social unrest: 2018, vers 1.0 of what we are living now. Their writing was something to hang onto. An alternative news flow based in feeling not fact. Emotional criticality on tap. Poets are experts in feeling and sense, they offer a different vision of things, and a different way of saying them. I’m interested in a cinema that can do the same.
Interviewed by Cyril Neyrat
