Write About (Now)
Reflections on A Point in the Making: Three Days with Babette Mangolte

As a by-the-book editor, considerations of grammatical tense, aspect, mood, and voice have become second nature to me. In written language, these elements are all contained within the verb form—the conjugation of an action thereby a reflection of its temporal reference. There are a few instances, though, when it is the stylistic preference to write about past actions in the present tense. The historical present is one such convention, employed in accounts of literary, theatrical, and cinematic plot as well as historical chronicles. In order to establish a sense of immediacy and presence, writing in the historical present limits representation of narrative action to the simple present or present perfect tense, regardless of the amount of time that has passed since the event occurred, story was written, or film was shot. In film journalism, this device of translatio temporum, or time-shifting, functions to disavow both the temporal and spatial displacement between the projected signifier and its referent, implicitly acknowledging the experience of cinema rather than its mechanism. In his introduction to the manuscript for Last Year at Marienbad, writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet describes this experience of cinematic temporality: “The essential characteristic of the image is its presentness. Whereas literature has a whole gamut of grammatical tenses that makes it possible to narrate events in relation to each other, one might say that on the screen verbs are always in the present tense… by its nature, what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not an account of it.”

Reflecting on the discussions that emerged over the course of three days of screenings and conversations with Babette Mangolte, I am struck by both the ingenuity and subtlety with which her filmmaking practice unpacks questions of presence and temporal displacement in cinema. Bookended by two screenings of the artist’s narrative films, “A Point in the Making” included a masterclass on the framing and exhibition of performance documentation as well as the adjacent presentation of Roof Piece (1973) and Roof Piece on the Highline (2012). Premised upon a recognition of the ever-increasing value of the unique forms of access her films enable, the programme provided a platform for Mangolte to impart both the technical and aesthetic approaches underpinning her methodology. Though notions of temporality were but a minor consideration within the discursive scope of the programme, I’d like to consider the techniques and structures Mangolte detailed in her talks in relation to these questions to draw out some of the underlying complexities of cinematic tense addressed in both her documentation and narrative works.

In delineating cinema’s mode of address from that of literature, Robbe-Grillet points to the cinematic image’s indexical rather than descriptive relationship to an action, and to its kinetic movement in time. Inherent in its indexicality, however, is the spatio-temporal distance from the performance of the action that marks the photographic arts with a sense of remove. The effect of the directness and immediacy with which performance art addresses its audience in relation to its filmic reproduction is to underscore this absence of the live body in its signifier. In taking up questions of choreographic documentation in relation to Mangolte’s film and video works, discussions throughout the course of the programme concentrated on various aspects of practice, while sidestepping, to a great extent, these more rehearsed ontological distinctions. With great precision and generosity of detail, Mangolte elaborated on her approach to each work presented—from grasping the conceptual anchoring of a particular choreographer’s practice to intuitively sensing and registering the unique choreographic phrases, muscle movements, and relationships that these practices produce. Throughout these discussions, emphasis was placed on the establishment of presence. In practice this entails determining optimal distances, angles, and movements in relation to the dancing body to best register its expressions. Presence, for Mangolte, is a goal and not a given. Her approach underlines the distinction between indexicality as a property of the filmic document and presence as quality of this image, measured in relation to its ability to bridge the distance between the viewer and performing bodies through visceral connection and intuitive technical means.

Reiterating the significance of intuition within her practice, Mangolte elaborated on her use of photography as a tool with which she could learn to frame her subjects before filming one-shot performance works. This practice of previsualisation carried over to her narrative filmmaking in the form of short “test” films for concepts she would later develop in long-format works. Initially conceived as training ground for the feature The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), (NOW) or Maintenant entre parentheses (1976) opened the final screening of the programme, marking a shift back to a focus on Mangolte’s narrative and subjective filmmaking. The film observes as the playful display and manipulation of objects progresses into more sensual forms of touch. Shot in under two hours’ time, Mangolte recounted that she approached the work with only the title and ending in mind. The wordplay here was immediately apparent to me—the French word maintenant deriving from the Latin root words for hand and holding, as in the moment you are holding in your hand.(

NOW)’s opening shots of a hand slowly adjusting its grip on a chair recalls Mangolte’s deft attention to the nuances of muscle movement in her dance films. We are left to imagine what offscreen gestures are causing the minute variations in the contours of each hand. This prompt to fill in what’s missing is similarly characteristic of Mangolte’s filmmaking, with its intentional omissions, fragmentation, and gaps, as she discussed in relation to the synechdochal representation of the choreographic transmission in both versions of Roof Piece, and the displaced offscreen voices narrating There? Where? (1979). Towards the end of the film, the actors’ hands are framed once again, the moment of their meeting inciting a suspension of action, a tableau vivant captured in four steady shots. Invoking photographic composition in its framing and stillness, the duration of this pose invokes a new sense of temporality within the work, the bracketing of an instant within a succession of movements.

Mangolte’s synopsis for the film reads, “Film = Now Projected Film = (Now).” Her use of parentheses in the film’s title is thus both a playful reference to the framed word NOW branding the empty packs of cigarettes the actors layer and collapse, as well as a reference to the layers of temporality collapsed in cinematic time. Though both the photographic and cinematographic image share the indexical quality of recording a moment in the past, it is the kinetic act of projection that effects its translatio temporum, its conjugation of past moments into present gestures. In its allusion to the photographic instant, the near-suspension of movement in (NOW) enacts a break with the continuous present tense in which film unfolds. This bracketed moment establishes a new relationship between the spectator and the image, calling attention to the discontinuity between the viewer’s present moment and the historical present appearing onscreen.

In much the same way as voice—as a measure of agency—and aspect—as a measure of continuity—inflect verbs in language, presence and movement come to bear on cinematic tense. The discursive threads that emerged from the various facets of Babette Mangolte’s practice examined in “A Point in the Making” highlighted, for me, the manner in which her filmmaking, uniquely situated in relation to both photography and performance art, draws on the types of relationships established between the signifier and the viewer in each of these forms and points to the subtle inflections of tense defining the cinematic (now).