The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977)

In this radical meditation on image-making, Babette Mangolte puts the viewer of the film in a vantage similar to that of the photographer looking at her subject. This structural device reveals a series of studio portraits not as neutral observational exercises, but as a subtle accumulation of interpersonal tensions and meanderings. In the film’s second half, Mangolte captures street scenes and reflections from SoHo buildings in a light-drenched metaphor of interiority and exteriority equal to the artist’s legendary work lensing the films of Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman (who appears in the film). In a work replete with dualities, the most revelatory is the film’s existence as both “a description of the act of making photographs” and a self-portrait at a singular moment in time.