Babette Mangolte
Camera
Biography
Babette Mangolte is a French cinematographer, film director, and photographer who has lived and worked in the United States since 1970. She is best known for her work with film director Chantal Akerman.
Known For
‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen
Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.
The Sky on Location
A personal meditation on the landscape of the American West that tracks the ruling conception in nature in the 19th and 20th centuries from the pioneers through the instamatic tourists, at the same time that it obsessively follows the four seasons. The elemental vicissitudes of the weather, the exact moment of the day, the colour of the light and the soil and the trees form an acute visual record of the constantly changing mood of the landscape. The film successfully attempts, with quiet, passionate, almost single-minded firmness, to confront us as nakedly as possible with our cultural inability to see nature whole, without preconceptions.
Autour de Jeanne Dielman
During the filming of "Jeanne Dielman" Sami Frey recorded what was happening on the set. A film about a film in the making.
Cinématon
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Home Movies 1971-81
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
There? Where?
A naive look at Southern California by an outsider, and/or an essay on displacement through the disjunction of Californian images and off screen voices. Where is the location of these voices, here or there? Are the images near or far in relation to the voices? Are the images commenting on the images or vice versa?
Interview with Babette Mangolte
"To begin with, we have Babette Mangolte, the camera technician on Hotel Monterey, La Chambre and Jeanne Dielman, but who for me also symbolises the New York years, she introduced me into the very core of what was new, even revolutionary, in New York, and our interview is about the city of New York in the early 70s." – Chantal Akerman
Simone Weil Avenue
The above narrative, by Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, was written into her last notebook. The places filmed show where she lived and worked during that time. It was 1942-43.
Filmography
as Voice
as Narrator (voice)
as N°31
as Self