Babette Mangolte

A lonely young widow lives with her son following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Two women are in search of a home in the Southern California landscape. From the outside looking in, they see the single-family home as the locus of the exclusion of the other. It is also unaffordable. They both feel as if they are invisible citizens. They witness how the architectural landscape imposed on the California desert appears as a reversal of nature, where exclusive living, gated communities and segregation go hand in hand. They dream of escape.

While working on a documentary about the city of Bruges, an artistically frustrated filmmaker must deal with the increasing difficulties in his marriage.

An avant-garde examination of the relationship between women and money in society, mixing musical, silent melodrama, and philosophical treatise into a heady, post-punk brew.

During the summer of 1968, a young French woman staying in an isolated country house reflects upon her involvement in the events of that May.

New York City's Monterey is a residence hotel, whose inhabitants are older and primarily live alone. The camera, usually stationery, observes the lobby. No score, the lobby is clean with granite floors, men wear hats, people enter and exit an elevator, the camera looks out from within the elevator as doors open and close. People sit alone and motionless in their apartments. There are long shots of empty halls. Paint peels. The flooring on upper levels is linoleum. Hall lights are florescent. Doors open a crack then close.

Jean-Pierre Gorin’s gripping and unique film about a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, is, like other works by the filmmaker, a probing look at a closed community with its own rules, rituals, and language. Part observational documentary, part fiction invisibly scripted and shaped by the director, My Crasy Life, which won a special jury prize at Sundance, is an enthralling and intensely focused contemplation of violence and dislocation.

Impersonal and beautiful images of Akerman's life in New York are combined with letters from her loving but manipulative mother, read by Akerman herself.

Akerman, by using 360° camera pans, explores the space of a small room like a succession of still lifes : a chair, fruits on a table, solitary objects in waiting. Amidst this thread of movement, there is only one living figure: a young woman, sitting on a bed.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Delphine Seyrig decided to work on a film project about Calamity Jane to reveal Jane’s sensibility and insight about life in those letters to her daughter. The reading of those letters permits a self-reflection about feminism and motherhood.

A “narrative” film centered on young artists living in New York City around 1979. The film is about a certain stage in the development of a young artist confronting the real world in terms of her own idealistic notions of what art is supposed to do. You never see her. She is the camera’s eye and when someone says to the camera “My darling be careful”, it could be addressing her or you the spectator. The subjective camera set-up challenges your position as an impartial observer. - BM

Adaptation of an avant-garde play about Rhoda, a hysterical heroine who feels oppressed by the people around her. She suffers through her birthday party, goes to see a doctor, plans a vacation, argues a lot and even breaks the fourth wall.

Chantal Akerman followed famous Choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers, The Tanzteater Wuppertal, for five weeks while they were on tour in Germany, Italy and France. Her objective was to capture Pina Bausch's unparalleled art not only on stage by behind the scenes.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

A filmed record of a solo performance by American postmodern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown. In order to better understand the dance, Mangolte learned to perform it herself. Mangolte shot Brown as she performed the solo twice, and then on the third take she decided to film in slow motion: "I shot slow motion, knowing that it would reveal the dance and the movement in a totally different context... the slow motion version permits a second look at the choreography, and the spectators can marvel at what they remember and also what they missed the first time around."

Cultural and perceptual contrasts are evoked in this non-linear mythic episode in which a hammer, a paintbrush, a bucket, a pile of clothes, a window full of globes and a couple are manipulated via the filmmaker/demi-urge.

A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A French filmmaker comes to New York to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.

An unfinished Chantal Akerman film about the troubled youths and drug addicts going through rehabilitation in Yonkers. Myra Alfreds, who commissions the film, accompanies Akerman and Mangolte on the film shoot in Yonkers, a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants in New-York State, just north of the Bronx. The images show the big window of the storefront serving as a reception center for street youth. The young people participate in a variety of full-time activities and undertake to stop taking drugs.

The film is about looking. I bet that slight variations of few recurrent elements would encourage the viewer to free associate and to fantasize a kind of narrative. - BM

For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

Considered one of Canada's most important women artists of the second half of the 20th century, Joyce Wieland's art embodies the essence of her homeland, feminism, and ecology. Artist on Fire: Joyce Wieland captures the vibrant spirit of this painter, collagist, quilt maker, and filmmaker. In the early '70s, Wieland was involved in filmmaking, producing movies with a political message. In her 30-year career, she worked in a variety of mediums, including cloth, pastels, colored pencil, oils, bronze, and watercolor. Her works and her influence are examined in this detailed video portrait.

Presents an intimate view of four decades of the Swiss-born artist Robert Frank who has had an extraordinary influence on contemporary photography and filmmaking. This documentary which examines his life through his films and photographs, includes interviews with many of his collaborators and contemporaries. Written, directed and edited by Philip Brookman, Amy Brookman