The French cinematographer Babette Mangolte, well known in avant-garde cinema circles for shaping the representation of women on-screen in films such as Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who (1974), directed a series of films about the American landscape in the 1980s. Following several years immersed in the downtown New York arts-scene, Mangolte travelled west for the first time in 1976, and was invited to teach in the Visual Arts department of the University of California San Diego three years later. There, she made the short There? Where? (1979), a film about learning how to drive and navigate Southern California, which served as a precursor to her fourth feature, Sky on Location (1982), a travelogue rumination on the American west.
The psychodrama of vast landscapes—their incongruencies, coincidences, and unpredictability—prevails across both films with Mangolte’s determined obsession to understand them. In the Sky on Location, the incessantly photographed vistas of iconic western landscapes (Jackson Hole, Teton National Park, Monument Valley, and more) are freely organized by various distinctions in the intensities of their color, climate, mood, and sounds. Multiple off-screen voices, including Mangolte’s, guide the film’s essayistic energy that weaves texts from Western lore, diary entries by 19th and 20th century colonizers, newspaper clippings collected during the filming, and personal observations. Her presence as an outsider is pronounced in both films–reacting to the indeterminacy of California and nature at large, the human inability to confront this nature without existing preconceptions. Mired by the elemental instabilities, Mangolte remarks in the Sky on Location, “I feel displaced as well as relieved…. The silence is there for days on end if I needed,” and preemptively in There? Where?, “You get corrupted by vagueness.”
In varying speeds, at different distances, Mangolte employs a panoramic camera movement that glides from one end to another, right to left and vice versa, irrespective of cardinal direction. Reminiscent of her earlier work in Akerman’s La Chambre (1972), the camera embodies a sentient presence—an elliptical subjectivity in photographing something that is going to change. Positioning herself in stark contrast to the Western landscape, Mangolte’s ever-interrogative use of the camera collocates an identification that evolves over a long period of time - not only over the several seasons in the shooting of these films, but also over the 45 years of teaching in California.
There? Where? and Sky on Location screen this afternoon, December 28, at Metrograph as part of the series “It Looks Pretty From a Distance.”
