Entretiens sur l'art Babette Mangolte

As a filmmaker, photographer, artist and author of critical essays, for more than 40 years Babette Mangolte has been developing an original body of work in photography and film, which for several years has been taking the form of installations. Born in France in 1941, Mangolte studied at the École nationale Louis-Lumière in Paris, where she trained as a director of photography—a profession then reserved for men. Thus she became the first camerawoman in France, but as a photographer, camerawoman and filmmaker she really started developing a body of work in New York, where she has been living since the 1970s. As a camerawoman, she has worked as director of photography on films by Chantal Akerman (Hotel Monterey, News from Home, Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, Un jour Pina m’a demandé…), Yvonne Rainer (Film About a Woman Who, Lives of Performers…), Marcel Hanoun, Jackie Raynal, Jean-Pierre Gorin and others. In the 1970s, she became the favoured photographer of performance and experimental contemporary dance in New York, closely capturing the work of choreographers and performers linked to the Judson Dance Theater. She photographed works by Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Joan Jonas and Robert Morris. Her famous black-and-white photographs, some of which are iconic, constitute an extraordinary documentary archive, which Mangolte is continuing to build.

Babette Mangolte defines herself as a filmmaker who also takes photographs. In the tradition of experimental cinema, she views film (which encompasses photography) as a means of experimenting with and deepening our perception of time, space and light. Whether working with others or directing her own films, Mangolte is above all a camera-eye (as she says herself). The camera is both tool and subject. She ceaselessly explores the position of the viewer or spectator: one of her most important films, “The Camera: Je, or La Caméra : I”, could serve as a subjective manifesto of that camerawoman for whom the I is an eye.

Babette Mangolte has directed several films, including: What Maisie Knew (this first film won the « Prix de la Lumière » at the Toulon Film Festival in 1975), The Camera: Je, or La Caméra : I (1977), The Cold Eye (1980), The Sky on Location (1982), Visible Cities (1991), Four Pieces by Morris (1993). More recently, she directed Seven Easy Pieces (2007), which documented the re-enactment of Marina Abramović’s original performances. In the exhibition Muses Insoumises at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, she is currently presenting her latest film Calamity Jane and Delphine Seyrig: A Story » (2019.) Babette Mangolte’s work has been presented in museum exhibitions exploring the New York avant-garde, as well as in many film programmes. Her films can be found in the collections of MoMA New York, the MNAM at the Centre Pompidou, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. Several major retrospectives of her films have been presented: in Germany at the Berlin and Munich cinematheques, in New York at Anthology Films Archives, and in Bordeaux at the CAPC in 2018. Large retrospective exhibitions have been presented recently: Babette Mangolte. I = Eye (2016) at the Kunsthalle Wien, and Spaces to SEE (2019) the first solo exhibition of Babette Mangolte’s work in France, at the Musée départemental de Rochechouart.