A Point of View, Babette Mangolte’s The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977) by Sarv Gersten
We are excited to announce that Sarv Gersten’s article, A Point of View: Babette Mangolte’s The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), has been published on Sabzian, an international film journal hailing from Belgium.
“On a warm Sunday last September, at New York City’s Metrograph Theater, Babette Mangolte introduced her 1977 film, The Camera: Je or La Camera: I, noting that although she had once felt the film explored imaging translation, she no longer felt this way. This curious manoeuvre: drawing attention to a once-held, now released, conviction, would be emblematic of the film to follow. As the theatre darkened, we the audience puzzled over what might have shifted Mangolte’s perspective, and she re-joined us to view her film – a masterclass dissection of subjectivity and photography
A French-born, US-based artist working in film, photography and installation, Mangolte was one of the first women to attend l’Ecole Technique de Cinématographie et de Photographie in Paris, before moving to New York in 1972. The heretofore uninitiated may know her by her associations: she has captured performances by artists including Trisha Brown and Marina Abromović and served as cinematographer for directors including Chantal Akerman, Joan Jonas and Yvonne Rainer. Camera was Mangolte’s second feature-length film as director, and it emerges from the 1970s New York avant-garde scene that list of names evokes. The eighty-eight-minute film, which Mangolte has described as a “self-portrait,” is shot entirely from the perspective of the photographer looking through a camera lens. Over the film’s three segments, we watch through the lens of Mangolte’s camera, and hear its shutter clicking away, as she works to capture still photographs. In the first part, we see a photoshoot in Mangolte’s studio, as a series of models – some more confident than others – pose on screen. Viewers observe the models’ shifting gestures as though they were the photographer themselves. In the film’s second section, Mangolte exits her studio onto the streets of 1970s lower Manhattan. We continue to see from the perspective of her camera lens, now hand-held, as it traces faces in the crowded streets; the facades of TriBeCa’s buildings; and shows occasional glimpses of the blue sky above. In the third and final section, Mangolte returns to her studio to look over developed images resulting from the photography sessions of the previous two sections. In these three movements, Mangolte sketches questions raised by the still photograph about perspective and subjectivity”