ΜΠΑΜΠΕΤ ΜΑΝΓΚΟΛΤ / BABETTE MANGOLTE
The film is an autobiographical and epistolary diaspora documentary, based on letters sent from Europe by Akerman's mother to her while she was living in New York. The letters give a familiar picture of family life, with reference to minor illnesses, household habits, engagements and financial worries. The text's elegiac emotionalism is counterpointed not only with the flat monotone of Akerman's recitation, but also with the images of Manhattan as an alien ghost town, with its streets sometimes preternaturally empty. Mangolte's long takes, with their magnificent composition and precise camera movements, contribute, with the sense of observing a decaying metropolis, to the expression of Akerman's existential weight.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a pioneering Belgian filmmaker of Jewish descent who experimented with matters of perception, gender, and sexuality, as well as the personal and historical traumas of the Holocaust. She made over 40 films, most notably Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), in cooperation with Babette Mangolte, with its long silent takes of a woman's daily life. She ended her life at the age of 65 in Paris.
Babette Mangolte (1941) is a French-American director, cinematographer, photographer and artist who has lived in New York since 1970. She has worked as a cinematographer with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer and has made important experimental films on the very act of looking, about the American landscape,
about contemporary dance and the art of performance. She is considered one of the most important artists of the American avant-garde and currently teaches at the University of San Diego in California.
