A New Documentary Looks at Etel Adnan’s Radical Mind and What She Left Us

The fog rises from Mount Tamalpais like a spirit, slowly billowing over spears of feathery redwoods and fluffs of fragrant bay laurels. A carpeted green California landscape meets sky and a lick of silvery Pacific Ocean. The mountain seems to breathe like a living being, and it acts as a central character in a new documentary about the late artist Etel Adnan, who similarly turned her attention to the mountain in numerous paintings and poems for over five decades.

Filmed during the last five years of Adnan’s life, before she died on November 14, 2021, at age 96, Adnan being and time (2026), which had its US debut at New York’s Rockaway Film Festival earlier this month, is the first feature film of Paris-based American director Marie Valentine Regan. From the late 1970s to the early 2010s, Adnan lived in Sausalito, California, at the base of Mount Tamalpais, located on the coast north of San Francisco. As the film progresses, the mountain’s sounds and landscapes increasingly stitch together a defining arc of Adnan’s life and practice, while she lived in exile from Lebanon, a period she describes as “a secret wish,” or something that isn’t all negative.

Like Adnan, I have spent much of my life with Mount Tamalpais and returned once again to it this summer, but Regan’s poignant film also awoke me to Adnan’s perceptions of its vast “thickness,” and the mountain’s sense of its “own time,” as she puts it in the film.

“For years I am going, coming back, turning around the mountain, getting up in the middle of the night to make sure it is still there, staring at it, walking all over it, and dreaming, dreaming,” Adnan writes in her 1986 book, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, which is quoted in the film. “I am ‘making’ the mountain as people make a painting,” she wrote. To Adnan, Tamalpais was an entity all its own: When a journalist once asked who the most important person was she’d ever met, she recalls replying, “It’s a mountain.”

Like her lens following the winding roads of Mount Tamalpais, Regan, who was a friend of Adnan’s, leads us closer to the artist herself, visiting her in her Paris home, bearing gifts, sitting in her studio, gallery, and sharing meals with friends. Throughout, the artist muses circuitously about the many facets of her extraordinary life: facing history “head on” after a childhood spent in Beirut; how she “absorbed” the lived catastrophes of her Syrian father and Greek mother, who witnessed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the 1922 burning of her mother’s native “lost city” of Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey); maintaining a visual art practice “in Arabic”; and what it means to experience “being and time,” central concerns of her art and writing.

Potent one-liners—“landscapes have their own time, the time it took to make them,” for example—ebb and flow through the film like fanciful poetic offerings, often on the nature of perception itself. Together, they form a rich portrait of an artist who has cracked the riddle—as best as can be expected—of a life lived fully open to the present, with its joys and sorrows, but mostly joys.

Now five years after her death, we have the works she left behind: vibrant, gestural tapestries, ink drawings, and minimalist, thick-surfaced, abstract paintings in her “worlds of color.” We also have this film, which offers us a chance to enter Adnan’s universe, to see and appreciate her artworks anew—it is impossible not to. There is Adnan, steadily and unhesitatingly marking up pages in ink, or scraping pigment onto canvases with a palette knife, creating simplified, color-rich forms drawn from nature and memory. “When I take a brush in black ink, and I draw the beginning of a tree, it’s a feeling of doing an essential thing—doing something that gives me inner peace,” she says in the film.

During the film’s production, Adnan never made it back to Mount Tamalpais, having to stay in Paris once she turned 90 because of the risks to her health were she to take a long-haul flight. Instead, we follow the artist shuffling through her Paris apartment, visiting the French coast, her gallery, but never too far removed from her beloved peak.

Seated on a couch in her cheerful, art-filled, and comfortably cluttered home, she remembers everything that led her here. “I grew up around ambiguities, around problems” in French-controlled Lebanon, she recalls of her childhood. (She was born in 1925 in Beirut.) “The French nuns [at school] were selling to us French culture … not as an addition, but as a replacement—and that’s a cultural crime. You become a foreigner in your own country.”

Skipping forward decades in time, she sought to address such a “cultural crime.” In response to the brutal Algerian War of Independence from French colonial rule (1954–62), Adnan famously stopped writing in French in solidarity, opting instead to write in English and to paint in Arabic. In the film, she refers to various such dualities in her life and art, often expressive of her Arab American identity. “My painting is the paradisiac side of the world, and my writing is the apocalyptic,” she says, suggesting that rather than an inner conflict, the two balance or respond to each other.

Indeed, infinitely resolute, she remembers never having felt the need to ask herself, “What am I?” She simply put paint to canvas, ink to paper. “We can’t afford to ask ourselves too many questions; it stops us from working,” she adds, while making an ink sketch of potted flowers. “That is what’s nice about art, it’s that you stop thinking … maybe there is unconscious thinking.” Making art, she continues, “suspends ordinary thinking. Maybe another thinking takes over, but we call it instinct. You know, instinct is not dead. It’s an inner movement; it’s a form. It’s pre-thinking thinking.” As she speaks, we witness her instincts in real time: she spontaneously begins to draw trees that “surge” upward; a gangly forest soon appears.

As a young student, Adnan left for Paris and later completed advanced studies in philosophy at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. She soon made the San Francisco Bay Area her home base, where she lived and taught for some 60 years. Though recognized as an accomplished poet for much of her career, Adnan found belated success as an abstract artist and master colorist, following her participation, at 87, in Documenta 13 in 2012. Major solo shows soon followed, including at the Serpentine Galleries (in 2016), the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (2016), the Centrum Paul Klee in Bern (2018), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018), and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2021), to name a few.

In Adnan, Regan could not have found a more captivating central character, whose incisive, ever-generous way with words, philosophical wisdom, and artworks are lovingly conveyed here. Regan makes it look easy, but she has threaded an entire life into a 70-minute film. Even for Adnan’s biggest fans, the documentary beckons us toward further inquiry, her work a site of continuous discovery in language, both visual and written.

One minor reservation I have with the film is that Adnan’s relationship with her life partner, artist and writer Simone Fattal, who published much of Adnan’s poetry, is kept at a certain distance. It is gently referenced several times, but we hear very little about Fattal from Adnan, and little from Fattal, though we see them hosting meals and attending a book signing together. We also see one of Fattal’s powerful, raw ceramic sculptures of two figures, The Meeting, which suggests their own first encounter.

That said, this is meant to be Adnan’s story, and given some clues, one can imagine shades of her life with Fattal. “What is a long relationship?” Regan asked me in an email responding to my question. “It is so many things and part of the deep texture of their lives. But I’ve tried to weave that into this film so it is there, evoked and felt, but at the same time part of this larger portrait of Adnan.”

Fattal, in a sense, also has the last word. In a final scene, we read that, just as Adnan wished, Fattal scattered her ashes on the hills of Mount Tamalpais.