A Point of View

Babette Mangolte’s The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977)

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.

The film’s full title, disorienting on the page (or screen), provides a statement of purpose in miniature. The blending of English and French, and wielding of both the personal preposition (“I”) and/or the definite article (“the”), enact in text the layering of perspectives which the film presents. The colons in the film’s title emphasise the choice to bracket the French with English. Rearranged, the title could more predictably read “I or The Camera: Je or La Camera,” forming a title which would retain bilingualism and the use of both personal pronoun and definite article. However, this illustrative rearrangement risks the (mis)implication that the French and English pieces say exactly the same thing. Mangolte’s title disrupts the presumption of readily ascertained meaning, prompting the reader to engage with any personal or cultural associations they may carry regarding the French and English languages. The structure and arrangement of the film’s title makes an audience aware that they, too, have a point of view – a realisation that will dawn on them again and again over the eighty-eight minutes to follow.

The mixing of English and French continues throughout the film, as do the illuminative junctures. Camera, like its complete title, is segmented into three parts. The film’s first section documents a series of photoshoots in Mangolte’s studio, which we watch from the perspective of the photographer, as if peering through the viewfinder of her camera. Various models and friends pose in front of a blue backdrop: some move with confidence, but most are simmering with the discomfort of being photographed. The series of models includes a lithe man in a fitted blue and white striped button down, leant over a table; a sweetly awkward moustachioed man with a younger counterpart, perhaps his son; and director Chantal Ackerman sitting in a stick-back chair, among others. Mangolte’s instructing voice rings out in both French and English, and is punctuated by the clicking of her film camera’s shutter and reload; at times, rapid, then sparing. The models shift their postures according to her command.

As fluidly as Mangolte moves between languages, so too does she shift between addressees. We nestle into her musing inner voice, which her models apparently cannot hear: “Voyeur? I don’t like to be voyeur. Though it’s sometimes necessary, to take the shot, or so they say. Nécessaire vraiment ? Être voyeur pour prendre cette photo ?” But as the film continues, we are increasingly confronted by her directing voice, addressed to the models: “your mouth, yeah, relax your mouth, yeah, la bouche, oui.” At times, these rapidly given directions render a viewer rather self-conscious. It is, “as if the screen we’re watching is photographing us,” as Camera Obscura founder Constance Penley has it. There is dissonance between the visual, which places us firmly in Mangolte’s perspective, and the audio, which at times gives us Mangolte’s internal thoughts, only to shatter this congruence of perspective with the sound of her directing voice, addressed to her subjects. We the audience see with Mangolte’s eyes, watching the models smile or fidget, but often hear with her models’ ears – an experience which constantly refocuses our attention towards the experience of subjectivity itself. Unsettling and fascinating, this movement vibrates between the experiences of taking a photograph and being the subject of one.

Fifteen years after the release of Camera, Mangolte lent her voice to a short film by American poet Fanny Howe, entitled Simone Weil Avenue (1992). The film clips together archival and purpose-shot footage, scored by the Kronos Quartet’s rendition of Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet. Over elegiac strings, Mangolte’s voice streams in, reading a mystical narrative formed from fragments of Weil’s final notebooks, in both the original French and an English translation. Weil’s philosophy, defined by an imperative to empty out the self and attend to God, bears interestingly on Mangolte’s Camera. Weil sought to render herself an open conduit through which God, truth and knowledge could flow; Mangolte, in Camera, is a far more active agent. Weil’s imperative to obliterate the self is in this sense opposite from Mangolte’s effort to trace the boundaries of the self.

However, what unites Weil, Mangolte and Howe is a commitment to paying attention to elusive subjects. The most striking visuals from Howe’s short show the mediation of light – a six-over-six window through which we watch falling snow; terracotta floor tiles enlivened by a quivering sunspot; bright yellow-green light splashed across banisters; the shadows of windows reflected on walls and doors, at times cast in warm yellow, at times in inky black and white. These ethereal scenes grasp at capturing something of Weil and her process – the short ends with a simple card informing, “the places filmed show where she lived and worked during that time. It was 1942-43.” Weil’s own philosophy vindicates attention as the ultimate creative act and valorises the effort in straining to attend to God, and to the space of God’s absence. Howe’s short seeks to capture something of that very process. Camera, too, is fiercely dedicated to attending to the elusive, as Mangolte works to capture the experience of authoring, and sitting for, an image.  

The second movement of Camera performs a comparable operation to the first but with New York City itself. We experience, still through her camera’s viewfinder, Mangolte exiting her TriBeCa studio and entering the sights and sounds of 1970s downtown Manhattan. This section is less confrontational; Mangolte’s voice is absent. Instead, we hear real-time audio, punctuated as ever by shutter-clicks, amid the bustle of the city streets, shot often on foot, at times from moving cars. In the scanning of the handheld camera, contrasts with the studio photoshoot emerge: interior becomes exterior, curation becomes spontaneity. The second movement bathes a viewer in the sheer multiplicity of experience present in the city; the manifold collisions of experience fostered by life in the metropolis.

In the internet age, collisions like this have rapidly proliferated, and as the volume of potentially accessible selves seems more infinite than ever, the glory of subjectivity has aged into a sense of dread. Words like “hyper-subjectivity” and “hyper-connectivity” are used in attempts to characterise the result of the rapid redefinition of interpersonal conditions that we have undergone in the last decades. Mangolte is attuned to these questions: her website describes an ongoing long-term project, provisionally titled, “The Meaning of Is,” in which she seeks to explore “our compulsion to indulge in multi-tasking, and to rejoice in information overload.” The project constitutes a database of short video-collage clips, each of which is composed from multi-media material – newspapers, magazines, video news clips, etc. – collected over the past twenty years. The collage-clips can then be randomly retrieved from the database, forming “collapsed meanings and ironic juxtapositions.”

In the final, and briefest movement of Camera, we return to the artist’s studio, where numerous photographs, some of the streets and models we have seen in the film, are laid out along the floor, and pinned to the walls. A friend of Mangolte’s is in the studio with her, and the two discuss and select photos. In this movement, we remain within the perspective of the camera, but the established condition of that perspective is somewhat disturbed. Mangolte’s friend is the first and only person we encounter in the film who is not – or, not solely – a subject of its camera. He weighs in on Mangolte’s selection process and bristles when she does photograph him; he is the only agent in the film to act directly upon the filmmaker, and it feels jarring. The film’s first two movements construct an image of perspective like a rose, formed by the layering of petals of attention – and the third plucks it straight from the ground. Mangolte, too, is viewer and viewed.

*

After the screening, I exited the theatre and emerged into the verve and shimmer of Ludlow Street, evening having arrived in my absence. Walking in the late summer air, crossing the same streets of Camera’s second movement nearly fifty years later, was fitting.