Babette Mangolte’s The Sky on Location
The Sky on Location
French-born Babette Mangolte is perhaps best known for her work as a cinematographer for Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer during their notable run of experimental narrative films produced in the Seventies. Mangolte’s firm camera placements contributed to an aesthetic of long-takes and stylistic minimalism designed to counter the male subjectivity, or gaze, of commercial narrative cinema. Mangolte’s The Sky on Locationfurther explores the subjectivity of vision with a personal essay on the American landscape of the West, attempting to see how our cultural constructs shape the way we see the natural world.
“The landscape is not seen in its postcardish grandeur as captured in the photographs of Ansel Adams, nor through its shapes as in paintings by Cezanne or Constable, but rather the film captures the mood of the landscape as in a Turner painting. The film attempts to construct a geography of the land from North to South, East to West and season-to-season through colors instead of maps”. – BM
Programme:
The Sky on Location, Babette Mangolte, 16mm, 1982, USA 78 min.
@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday July 20, 2010 | 8:00pm screening
The Sky on Location