BABETTE MANGOLTE is a prolific cinematographer/photographer from the 1970s and ‘80s who worked on landmark feminist films such as Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1973), and films with Chantal Akerman, most notably JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975), which won an award at Cannes.
JEANNE DIELMAN is not distributed on video yet, but if you get a chance to see it, you must. It’s the first feature film by a woman that expresses a cinematic language of a woman’s world (a Belgian housewife who does prostitution on the side to support her son) from a woman’s perspective. JEANNE DIELMAN boldly breaks almost every Hollywood rule; the film is 3 1/2 hours with long takes ranging from 12-20 minutes, the constructed space is mostly medium to wide angle, with no close-ups and elliptical editing. Come to think of it, there’s no musical score or any special effects.
You leave the film, as with any film you’ve seen shot by Babette Mangote, with a strong sense of the visual, sometimes it’s the framing such as in HOTEL MONTEREY (1973) and NEWS FROM HOME (1977) or sometimes it’s the color such as THE GOLD DIGGERS (1981) or the lack of color such as JEANNE DIELMAN.
Three years ago I met Babette Mangolte at a Van Gogh retrospective at LACMA. We sat in the little sculpture garden with the Rodin discussing my work (she was interviewing me for a teaching position at UCSD), and Van Gogh’s painting. I was impressed with Babette’s extensive knowledge of art. She would talk about Van Gogh then Robert Frank then Henri Matisse to Andy Warhol, all of course in an interesting context.
Since that time, I have learned about Babette’s own films, which she has written, produced, directed, shot and edited. Unlike some filmmakers who seem to repeat the same visual style or formula, Babette’s films are all different. She’s made about nine films, which have similar themes. For example, Babette’s first three films are about looking and subjectivity, and the second three films are about landscape (Babette had moved to California and was dealing with her relationship to the alienating world of the “west coast”), and the third series of films are about looking at art. Interview by Minda Martin
CINEMAD: What triggered your interest in image-making?
MANGOLTE: There was no cinematography school that accepted women when I went to film school in France in 64. But I wasn’t aware of film school any way then.
I just learned about their existence of film school when I was seeing a retrospective of George Cukor at the French Cinematheque. I was the only person with somebody else who was seeing every film twice. I sat next to him and asked him why and he said he had to write a paper on George Cukor for his film school and he explained to me how to apply and where. At the time they were two film schools in Paris. I applied to both, was accepted in the two but one denied me entry in the section cinematography because I was a woman. The other one was a state school and couldn’t deny me entry. You see when you took the exam they didn’t know your name. So it is at the oral exam that they made me aware of the fact that cinematography wasn’t for woman but I didn’t believe them.
So I started my film education not by going to film school but by watching films.
Why cinematography not directing? I had no idea at the time why I was more interested in the image making than the story telling. Seeing up to five or six films a day I was very aware of how stories were repeats of each others following formulaic models. Sometimes those stories were very well told by a John Ford and not as well told by another filmmaker. So the fabric of the film was for me the image and the sound and those were more important than the story the film was telling. When I got interested in film I saw mostly Hollywood and French films. One of the first films I saw was Max Ophuls, LOLA MONTES (1955), also Jean Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION (1937). I saw those two films in the late fifties with my father.
Now my first strong visual expression came not from film, but from painting. My mother took me to the museum and to galleries a lot. At the Easter vacation the family would go to Paris for two weeks and go to museums or gallery shows all day and to the theatre every night.
I remember a show in the early 50s. It was a show of Monet Cathedral of Rheims and the Westminster Bridge. The paintings were a series of paintings by Claude Monet where he used different color patterns with the same motif, either the Cathedral of Rheims the famous gothic facade of the cathedral of the city where they make the champagne wine or the London site of Westminster Bridge.
I saw Monet’s show of twenty variations on the same motif, I was absolutely bulled over. When you are eleven years old it’s kind of amazing to realize that variation is the essence of what art is about. I obviously couldn’t formulate that at the time, but I was amazed by the rich experience of seeing almost the same thing but not quite the same thing.
For me looking at painting is still one of my greatest pleasures.
But you don’t paint? Oh no, I never studied painting, but I still feel that it’s important in term of reactivating my energy in terms of visuals. In the past it wasn’t the case, I really discovered the American landscape by looking at American film. And vice versa, I discovered the Film Noir aesthetic through urban decay in American film. Film has given me an iconography, which is so rich. But film now doesn’t give me any new iconography. It’s not new. The only iconography I feel is new is in painting.
But no, I’m not going to ever be a painter. But if you are visual person, you need visual stimulation. Frankly, I think the young people have a very hard time to get visual stimulation now because there is a degradation in the visual stimuli provided by the culture around us that’s extreme. And it’s coming from the abundance of advertisements at the exclusion of all other visuals in magazines, on the web, the low resolution of films see on VHS as well as TV. Nobody gives much attention to the quality of the image anymore.
So was there a particular style or painting you were thinking of when you shot JEANNE DIELMAN? When I work on a film I don’t think about painting. I really feel you have to be an athlete if you are a filmmaker. You have to exercise the two senses, which are used in film, which is the ear and the eye. So in relation to JEANNE DIELMAN I never thought of a pictorial reference. The reference was a consciousness of time and the work of Michael Snow that I shared with Chantal when she was in New York in the early seventies. We worked on short experiments like THE ROOM (1973) or HOTEL MONTEREY, which was made in ‘73 in New York. Those films went to a festival in Nancy (town in the east of France where there was a well known theatre festival, which also presented some films) and were seen by Delphine Seyrig the well-known actress of LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961) and MURIEL (1963). Delphine had lived with her husband, an abstract expressionist painter, in New York. She had her first film role in PULL MY DAISY (1959), the Robert Frank movie. It is in Nancy that Delphine befriended Chantal and two years later, she agreed to do JEANNE DIELMAN.
Really, without her, the film does not exist. You see, she’s key to the imagination of the film and why the stylisation of the character works. Delphine was an actress able to make an interpretation and not be the real thing. The key to the film JEANNE DIELMAN, is making Jeanne Dielman a character embodying a certain archetype, which at the time had not been expressed in film. The only person who attempted to do something similar was Germaine Dulac in the 20s in THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET (1922).
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1976)
So this is how JEANNE DIELMAN started, meeting Delphine? It’s more than that. Chantal went back to Europe in ‘73. In May or June, she wrote me a letter and said, “I have a job for you. Are you coming to Paris this summer?” It was director of photography work for a group of women who wanted to shoot 35mm feature film, and Chantal was hired as assistant director. The group of women was actually a feminist group. Although I knew about feminism from the American context, I had met Kate Millet and others then but the French context was quite different. I met all the people who were important in the feminist movement in New York between 1972 and 1973. But during that summer of 1973 in Paris for the first time I was in contact with people who felt that there was a feminine language that had to be invented. Unfortunately they also were quite extremist in their views and were convinced that if you were speaking to a man you were tainted. And I had problems renting equipment, because the only places to rent equipment were owned by men and managed by men, so I had to speak to them to get the permission to hire a trained assistant to test the camera. Only a man was available, there was hardly any woman then in the field. I’m not going to make camera tests without a trained assistant. I had that kind of problem to solve.
The experience that I shared with Chantal on the aborted project was instrumental in the making JEANNE DIELMAN. It’s not that we don’t love our father. But indeed in terms of relation with authority, the father figure is not like the mother figure. We can think there are two languages-- the language of the father and the language of the mother. And we as feminists have to try to invent a language that will not be mimicking the language of the father. Wrestling with that utopian idea was very empowering for me.
Yes, it has been explored for some time in literature. I had read Virginia Woolf and even discussed it with my mother when I was a teenager. My mother had been a feminist in her twenties, I think. When her father who was bankrupted told her that there was little money left for a dowry, she told him “I don’t want a dowry. I want an education”. So she went to the university and that’s where she met my father. In any case, I felt the language of the mother is the woman sensibility that you bring to your work. It doesn’t have to be a work whose subject matter is only concerned with women issues. And that is my kind of feminism.
In all my work I have privileged woman protagonist because I know about woman more than man. I have privileged expressing something that is under represented in mainstream culture or in experimental work, you know something no one else has done before such as making a film about making photographs from the perspective of the photographer. Nobody had done a film like that when I did THE CAMERA: JE (1977). I call that my feminism, my brand of feminism. It’s a woman doing something that no one else has done. It’s the same thing with JEANNE DIELMAN. The story of a woman doing her chores had never been done before because no one had thought it was possible to show somebody doing dishes and little else. It’s not dignified,
it’s not interesting, there is no drama. But fuck it, our mothers, our grandmothers, us, we have been doing it every day for ages and therefore at some point we have to look at it and show it to the world, because it’s there. That’s the idea. It is there and film is about what is there!
When did you know that JEANNE DIELMAN would be made without ellipsis, in real time? After two days of the shooting, we realized the duration for each shot was going to be long. Chantal didn’t want to cut. She wanted to let her have her space. We started by shooting the dining room scene. There is some dialogue. We did everything by angle in relationship with the room. My light was changing with relation to the time of the day in terms of color and light.
I used photographs as a training tool. My practice was to use my still camera to scout film locations. And I used contact sheets, which I gave to Chantal for planning HOTEL MONTEREY and JEANNE DIELMAN so we could refer to the framing. I had three lenses, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm and I used those three lenses on every room. And those framings were not copied when we shot the film but just a reference for the image. The only film for which I didn’t do that was for my film THE SKY ON LOCATION (1982). This is a film about landscape and about light, which makes the landscape move. So you have to capture the light, the framing isn’t what you capture. You capture a movement in the light that enfolds through time. You have to be very quick with the camera getting it on the tripod. So the speed of working or driving the car and packing the camera was of the essence. The light was all over moving so fast. If you were too slow in setting up the equipment the light effect was gone by the time you rolled the film stock.
I wasn’t anticipating how light would be important into the making of the real time aspect of JEANNE DIELMAN, which I think is the fundamental striking feature of it. Because that sense of real time is connected with undervalued gesture… somebody waiting for potatoes cooking, a woman alone with no drama. The theme became emblematic of a desire for woman to speak their world, a world that was never represented before. So it was obvious it was conceptualized by Chantal in the script and it was realized by the cinematography and the acting.
It came to MOMA and I was sitting next to my friend Annette Michelson. We saw the film and we looked at each other and we knew we had seen a masterpiece. The film is not yours and it’s as good as RULES OF THE GAME (1939). It is out there. It’s very strange. The film is greater than Chantal, greater than me, greater than Delphine.
How do you prepare for “the look” of a film? In relation with the way cinematographers when I started thought about what they were doing, I hated that concept of “the Look,” which has nothing to do with the story. That is one of the first things I became aware off in the late 60s when I started shooting films. So JEANNE DIELMAN is definitely informed by something I had rationalized previously about what not to do.
As a cinematographer, you do not impose a style. You serve with a style that is appropriate to the story. So when people ten years later say “Oh we admired so much the cinematography you did in JEANNE DIELMAN, can you do it again?” That was enough to turn me off. “What do you think? That cinematography is just a recipe out of a bottle that it’s going to work the same way?” It’s bound not to work if it’s not the same story.
There’s a certain style in your framing such as frames within frames and a lot of sky when shooting landscapes. Definitely the framing is informed by painting and also by the fact that you look at the screen from a lower point of view in a movie theater than at home on your TV set. The classical cinematographer in the 60s was told to distinguish film framing with more head room and a lower centre of gravity for the image and TV framing with less head room and a more compacted frame because of the proximity of the TV set to the viewer that is so different from the distance of the film viewer in a movie theatre.
I feel that being at eye level can often look down. It’s a position, which can be awkward in that it can make people fatter -- which in the Hollywood canon is a no-no, and it can be difficult to move the camera. Also, when I started, I was not that experienced so I did things out of ignorance, but realized it worked. The best complement I ever got was from Robert Frank. I was shooting a documentary with him. “Oh you photograph people like if they were giants.” I thought that was a huge compliment.
THE SKY ON LOCATION (1982).
I give presence to people. That’s something I learned from American film, from John Ford in particular. It is the classical idiom of the American film of the 30s and 40s. Visual Presence is making the star. And the cinematographer is the one doing it. The presence is coming from the cinematography, coming from the light, from the framing, from the concentration on the figure. I’m very keen on delivering an image that’s simple enough that there’s no ornament, but par down enough that it’s become emblematic. You want something that doesn’t have clutter, but can be seen very quickly, and proportioned and balanced, so that you can look at it long enough without being bored. The viewer is sucked into the shot, because of the physical presence. I’m very keen on that since the beginning.
I notice a strong sensibility of color in your films. My sense of light and of color is coming from my grandmother who was a peasant and she told me how to observe the color of the sky and how to guess from it if it was going to rain the next day. I learned that when I was eight years old. Color is how you predict the weather in France and the weather is extremely variable and quickly changing. What I learned as a child informed the making of my fourth film THE SKY ON LOCATION. Now that I think of it, I realize that I was visually trained by those two women my grandmother and my mother. I wish I could you show a photograph of my grandmother and my niece, her great-great-granddaughter. My grandmother is in front of a modest house at the bottom of a short staircase leading to the front door. On top of the stairs is my five-year-old niece with hands on her hips mimicking the same gesture than her grandmother at the bottom of the stairs! They are both looking up and far away at the sky. You have the symmetry of the small body of the child and the aged, slightly hunched-back body of the ninety-three year old. I took that picture in 1975.
I really learned cinematography in black-and-white like most film students. And I worked on a film as an assistant in 1969, that was mixing black-and-white film stock with color stock on 35mm, which was really important to it… LE PRINTEMPS (1970), by Marcel Hanoun, that I discovered color cinematography. The art director is really very instrumental in the quality of the final color, by his choice of color in costumes and set design. On this film, I was lucky enough to be trained as an assistant cameraman with a crew where the art direction was beautifully designed and done with skill. This is rarely the case now, specifically in independent and cash poor productions. People don’t actually put much thought on the color palette nowadays. But it’s also the time. In the sixties and seventies the use of color was toward avoidance of complementary colors, using few colors and taking color out.
Originally, I learned photography because I wanted to be a cinematographer, not a photographer. But I couldn’t afford to practice with motion picture film. I’ve always done better work if I frame and light; doing both camerawork and DP work. I need to see the framing to refine my light. The two things are combined. Photography was just a way to make a living; same for lab work
When I came to New York I worked as a lab technician. The owner of the lab was very generous and sympathetic. He gave me free paper and chemistry. This is how I did all the dance photographs of my early years in New York. This was an enormous gift, which made possible all the photographs I made from ‘71 to ‘74.
Looking at something deeply is helping you intellectually. The problem now is not due only to a transformation of film where people making film do not know film, but think in terms of money; of marketing or think in term of a product to sell. For me photography was a way to train my eye. It’s more difficult to find money to shoot a film than to shoot photographs. But the process is very different.
How so? In photographs you have to be reactive. In film you have to invent, be organized, and know what you want. You don’t have time to decide while you shoot if you don’t have preconscious-ness of what you want to do. You have to be extremely organized and in photography you don’t. One doesn’t train you for the other, but one helps the other.
It helps because you have to look at contact sheet, looking at foreground and background position. We know we are moving in a three-dimensional space. If you don’t shoot an image, you don’t realize it. That thinking around one static image helps you.
I did photographs of dance and theater. The decisions when you shoot photograph are on the fly. It helped me become very quick in my framing. Same thing occurs in film; somehow it’s because I know the script. The choices are never haphazard. It’s very important to realize that every choice in framing signifies.
THE CAMERA: JE (1977).
You’ve shot quite extensively choreography. When I was a kid I liked theater. I like the stylization of theater, I like the costume, the light. I love spectacle. That’s the reason I like Hollywood movies because they are spectacle, so I’m not just an experimental filmmaker. Now the dance that I discovered in the early seventies was just the opposite of spectacle. It was essentially bare movement. It was a certain category of modern dance that influenced by the desire to renew dance movement with gestures from daily life performed by dancers who were not necessarily trained as dancer. That school of modern dance was about a simplified movement that did not require skill.
It was a question of duration. Very often the movement was repeated for a long time. There was no repeat of the movement. There was no narrative unfolding. It was abstraction. Most of 20th century early modern dance has been tied with story telling as in Martha Graham. But suddenly the movement did not symbolize anything. Its just there as a fact. That aspect interested me. I’m fascinated by people moving and people who are beautiful. I like to look. I think looking at dance it trained me to be a better cameraperson and a better filmmaker.
The gesture of the body is so beautifully captured in JEANNE DIELMAN. So why didn’t you continue to work with actors on your own films? It wasn’t the case at first. The performers presence creates the interest of the shoot for me. My first three films WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1975), THE CAMERA: JE (1977) and THE COLD EYE (1980) had performers. And now my current project is totally structured by the question of what is an actor? The project is a documentary on the actors in PICKPOCKET, the film by Robert Bresson shot in 1959.
One reason I stop working with actors in my own films is because one of my subject matters is the presence and absence of the self. One way to make absence felt is the absence of the representation of the body, letting the voices without bodies the task to evoke a subjectivity free from the boundaries of the body. It used that strategy in the three films I made that I called my landscapes films; THERE? WHERE? (1979), THE SKY ON LOCATION (1982) and VISIBLE CITIES (1991).
But in THE COLD EYE, which is the most traditional of all my films, I never was totally satisfied with the acting. And I think it is one of the reasons I focused my energy away from the performer’s body for a decade. The story is about a young painter. You never see the painter. The camera eye is the painter’s eye. The film viewer sees what she sees. It is a modern version of the subjective camera techniques of point of view shots used by Robert Montgomery in LADY IN THE LAKE (a Philip Marlowe story shot in 1947). In THE COLD EYE, there is practically non-stop dialogue. It’s regular dialogue between the painter, a young woman and the people she is talking to or who talks to her. When they talk they look straight into the camera lens and it is great. But when she speaks it is not the viewer who is speaking and the effect for the film viewer is unsettling. What is discussed in the film is art making. It’s the only film I don’t have a video of. I think there was problem in the acting. There was a lot of English dialogue.
I think I didn’t really understand the voice the intonation of the English dialog of THE COLD EYE because of my French accent. I used mostly non-trained actors. The unseen lead actress was putting too much emphasis on certain words. She was playing with the text. The delivery of the line was a bit awkward. The film went to Berlin and got me money to make THE SKY ON LOCATION. But I felt I failed as a director of actors. Because I think the actor is absolutely key to the success of the film. Delphine Seyrig is key for the success for JEANNE DIELMAN
That’s surprising, because in your films, I notice you pay careful attention to voice. I don’t believe in commentary voice, voice that tells you things. In my landscape films the voice is conversational, but still elaborate, still a learned voice, a voice that is informed. It’s not small talk. It’s somebody saying something and somebody saying something else which is complementing it. In VISIBLE CITIES, I structured the text around two voices that are not equal. One’s is of a woman older than the other. They don’t say their age, but you understand their age differences. When they are imagining things, when they drift in the landscapes, imagining the utopian cities, the older one imagines structures exploring organizational concepts of the cities, when the younger one imagine things based on pragmatic assumptions and money.
In THE SKY ON LOCATION I was not interested in character differences. I wanted two women’s voices and a man’s voice where those voices were more or less taking the relay of each other’s, like an echo. My voice, with my foreign French accent, was more or less representing the naïve look on the landscape that an immigrant can have. It reflects the position of somebody from the outside who discovered with wonder the new consciousness of what wilderness is about.
Indeed there is no wilderness in Europe. It just doesn’t exist in Europe. That’s a concept that has probably lost one or two millennia ago.
WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1975).
The three voices were equivalent in terms of knowledge, age, and one had an accent and therefore brought a different perspective because of the accent. But in VISIBLE CITIES I really wanted character and it’s a film that is totally structured by the narrative.
Who is Maisie? Maisie is the name of the child from my first film, WHAT MAISIE KNEW. In 1975 I made that film which is about the child who is four years old. The story is inspired by a novel by Henry James and her first name is taken from the James novel. I thought that if Maisie was four or five in 1975, sixteen years later she would be twenty-one years old. It is the Maisie who lives in California. In the other film she was in New York. It’s just an in-joke.
As a woman cinematographer in the sixties and seventies, did you have had to deal with extreme sexism? When I came to New York in late October, 1970, people were distinguishing their day job that was paying for their living expanses and their work, meaning their artwork in general was not income producing or even cost the surplus money they were earning at their job. I also learned to distinguish between job and work. And thank God since the mid-70s I have managed to survive by doing my work and nothing else. I could dispense with “jobs.”
When I left film school I couldn’t find any work as a cinematographer or as an assistant. I had a very hard time finding even replacement AC work, and if I was doing AC work it was just replacement work for a one-day job. But the cameramen, who was getting me as AC, was always put off with me because I was a woman. They could not tell me the same dirty jokes they had used with a male AC. They felt awkward when they saw me carrying the equipment, which is the job of the AC, so I couldn’t stay in a job. I couldn’t hook up with a cameraperson and I was starving. So after really being in duress, I had no other choice than to take a job as an editor. I knew nothing about editing. I wasn’t taught that in film school because it was a school on cinematography only. In my class there were 30 students, 28 men, one woman who wanted to be an editor and I who wanted to be a cinematographer. Two years later I had not achieved it but she had. So I called her the day before I went on my first editing job to get some sense of what I needed to know. And I managed fine thanks to her help!
My luck was that I was working alone at that editing job, so I was slower but I manage to get it done. I learned a lot about sound. I felt it was very important. Now I think it’s very important for a cinematographer to know editing. You shoot better coverage and provide for shots that match! I didn’t know it at the time.
Was there a difference as a cinematographer between working with female directors and male directors? If you work with a woman there is a sense of a film language to be claimed, which has to be specific to woman’s language so you are much more involved in making experimental work because of it. You know you are doing something that few women have done before. In the momentum of the feminist movement of the seventies that necessity to do work related to women’s concerns was very important. You had few role models and they had to be women. In the eighties, it became irrelevant and the sex of the director didn’t change anything. And now what is relevant is that producers still don’t trust women at the camera. In production the bulk of the money is the camera department and even now most men don’t trust women with what they think is their bad days, feminine troubles and lack of logic. Things have not changed much in thirty years!
What inspired you to make your own films? Frankly, it’s Chantal. In 1973, she decided to go back to Europe because she wanted to make fiction films and felt that New York was not the place to do that for her.
In winter of 1972, I had shot Yvonne Rainer’s film LIVES OF PERFORMERS (1972). Strangely that film was a real success. I think it’s a wonderful film. It costs very little money and little know-how. Suddenly I was in New York working on a great film as a DP. I thought I should stay in New York. For Chantal, New York had been a very exciting place for her, but she wanted to go back to Europe. Before she left somebody gave her black-and-white film stock that was outdated and she said, “I don’t want to take the stock with me. It’s too heavy. Why don’t you keep it and make a film?” And so I started to shoot some footage. An idea comes to me about the exploration of a child’s subjectivity that I got from the Henry James’s novel and I finished the project WHAT MAISIE KNEW.
But I wasn’t very convinced when I finished that (directing is) what I wanted to do. I went to Brussels to shoot JEANNE DIELMAN. I was committed to be a cameraperson and my films weren’t really important to me. But because MAISIE got a prize in France, I got money to do a second film, which is THE CAMERA: JE. During the making of that film I realized that I had a unique experience as someone who was totally structured by the idea of the gaze and by looking. In my years in New York I had been functioning essentially outside language and lived by looking. I was learning English but I mistrusted language. But in shooting CAMERA JE, I also realized I wasn’t interested in storytelling but in communicating my experience.
Do you still want to shoot for other directors? I’ve given up camerawork. I was supposed to be DP for a film in France. At the last minute the production didn’t want me and axed me out. They were not sure I could work fast enough. They really respected my work and knew I could do it, but they were afraid that for the quality I would demand they didn’t have a budget that could provide for it.
I loved to shoot and I love being a cameraperson. But I think it’s over. Ageism again. The fact is because most of the people deciding are now young enough to be my sons and few could be daughters I must say. It is not a good time for visual people. The film world is very much against them, and most films aren’t visually interesting anymore.
Do you want to talk about ageism? Ageism is more or more prevalent in the culture but for me it is a new sprout of the good old misogyny of my youth. I have devised my own strategy a long time ago.
Somehow I always knew I had to delude myself. Somebody told me in the mid-sixties, “You can’t go to that school to study cinematography because there is no woman cinematographer.” I didn’t want to hear it. I’m going to go to that school although I’ll be the only woman. So I always felt that it was better to avoid looking at certain facts. Because if I look at them there’s no room for a woman to exist, especially in the film world. So you have to delude yourself. In the seventies I did it very successfully. In the eighties I kept doing it but my first problem came because I was very sick and didn’t work for two years and when I went back I competed for jobs and I didn’t get any.
Interestingly, being a filmmaker, although not known at all, and being a well-known cinematographer does not help you build a career. Because as a well-known cinematographer you upstage the beginning director, and it is compounded by the fact you are also a filmmaker. So in the late 80’s I got into that problem. I was well known as a cinematographer, but that was creating a problem. It really blocked me.
Now in my work I use the difference between generations in VISIBLE CITIES. The fact that the average film now speaks only of the psychology of a twenty year old is deeply distressing to me. You know there is not a diversity of generation. Certainly it is a far cry from the Hollywood classical period.
THE SKY ON LOCATION (1982).
I see you bought a digital camera. With DV you can practice, refine your image and shoot, you could do the same thing if you want to train yourself, potentially it’s great because it is cost free or almost. But in fact I don’t think you do train your self in any meaningful for a filmmaker. Film is not DV. One of the key difference is that you shoot sound with picture in DV and not in film, the other is you don’t have to change your magazine every 10 minutes and never think of not shooting in DV, when it is basically the most important question in film. Why shoot this instead of that when you can shoot only five minutes for that scene? You have to conceptualise what you do instead of reacting to it after it is done. For me comparing film and digital, it is like night and day. DV doesn’t have the same reaction to light, and the colors are very different. It’s a new machine. There’s very little I can apply from what I know in film to digital. Film cameras are not automatic. In DV you end up mostly as prisoner of software decisions and automatisms that are counterproductive.
originally published 2005 Cinemad magazine
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