Scenes of quotidian life are presented through the eyes of a young girl. Influenced by the structural cinema of the time, Mangolte, in her first film, draws from the novel by the same name by Henry James and experiments with subjective camera and haphazard narrative. As different situations repeat and evolve, some of them erotic and some others funny, we see, as the girl sees, glimpses of gestures, exchanges and body parts, and we hear minimalist sounds and some words. In the words of Mangolte: “The film is about looking. My bet was that slight variations of few recurrent elements would encourage the viewer to free associate and to fantasize a kind of narrative”. Noteworthy are the shots of the room with the fog. Its small cast includes Yvonne Rainer and the composer Philip Glass.
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.
Photos: What Maisie Knew, Roof ©1975 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved
