Babette Mangolte (born 1941 in Montmorot, France, lives and works in New York) is an iconic figure of the international
experimental film. Mangolte's early interests lay within the field of
performance: documenting the art,
dance and
theater scene of the 1970s. In the late 1970s she began to focus on the
urban environment and the vast
landscapes of the
U.S. West Coast.
Babette Mangolte was the cinematographer for Chantal Akerman,
Yvonne Rainer a.o. In 1975 Mangolte completed
What Maisie Knew, her first film, which received the "Prix de la Lumiere" at the Toulon Film Festival in 1975. Other important films by Babette Mangolte are amongst others:
The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977),
The Cold Eye (1980),
The Sky on Location (1982),
Visible Cities (1991) and
Four Pieces by Morris (1993). One of her most recent films is
Seven Easy Pieces (2007) which documents Marina Abramović's re-enactment of seminal works from the 1970s at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Babette Mangolte received the Women In Motion price in 2022.