Babette Mangolte has been an important figure in European and American avant-garde art and filmmaking as a still photographer, lighting director and cinematographer since the late Sixties. In addition to her role as cinematographer for Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and News from Home (which we are screening tonight), Mangolte has worked closely with Marcel Hanoun, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Foreman, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Michael Snow and Joan Jonas. Born and educated in France, Mangolte began living and working in New York in 1970. Currently she is teaching at UC San Diego. Her two previous films, What Maisie Knew (1974) and The Camera: Je/La Camera: I (1977), “productively blend both European and Amrican avant-garde concerns,” according to Constance Penley, writing for Camera Obscura. “The American minimalist attention to the material properties of the object, with its method of découpage and mathematical recombination, finds itself reworked with the more European concern with narration and fiction.
“Mangolte begins the conceptualization of her films from a very literal notion of ‘point of view': as a photographer and cinematographer, her first concern has always been the physical placement of the camera. She proceeds from this concrete notion of point of view to a complex investigation of the rhetorical, social and unconscious aspects of point of view.”
The Cold Eye (My Darling, Be Careful), Mangolte's most recent film, which saw its world premiere at San Francisco's 80 Langton Street in November, is a story about young artists living in New York in 1979. As with her previous films, it is also a study in subjective camera.