The Models of Pickpocket (Breaking Silence)

BABETTE MANGOLTE

• Harry Ransom Center, Saturday, 3pm

• Cast: Martin Lassalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie
• Scenario and Direction: Babette Mangolte
• Screenplay, Camera, Sound, Editing: Babette Mangolte
• Assistant Editor: Kenny Strickland
• Additional Camera: Mark Daniels
• USA | Video | Color | 89min | 2003

Babette Mangolte, one of the first women accepted by L'Ecole Nationale de la Photographie et de la Cinematographie, has been a cinematographer and filmmaker for over 30 years. Perhaps best known for her work as a cinematographer on landmark films by directors such as Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, and Sally Potter, her films include The Camera: Je (1977), The Cold Eye (1980), and The Sky On Location (1982).

During a chance encounter at a party, Mangolte recognizes a face she has known most of her life yet never met: that of genetics researcher Pierre Leymarie. As a young man he played a lead role in Robert Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket. Based on this encounter, Mangolte begins to track down the three lead "models" of Bresson's film, none of whom were professional actors at the time. In discussing their experience as actors for Bresson, it becomes clear that their encounter and work with Bresson during the Summer of 1959 had an impact on their lives far beyond what one might have suspected.

A deceptively simple film, it belongs to that rare class of "cineaste" films that take on a subject much larger than cinema: the role of art in people's lives. It is not about the auteur, but about the effect of the experience on the other people involved. Perhaps the only film it can be compared to, although very different, is Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up, in which an unemployed man finds artistic self-expression through impersonating the great Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Comprised largely of interviews, one of the startling elements of the film is Mangolte's "look" at the people she is interviewing. It is a look that is full of love and respect, but at the same time a little clinical. Sometimes the subjects are ahead of Mangolte, sometimes she is ahead of them. In this age of automaton talking heads, it is almost shocking to see this kind of a critical approach taken on a visual level, not through the insertion of the interviewer into the frame, but through a precise delineation of the relationship to the subject.

Despite its basis in interviews, The "Models" of Pickpocket is a very pleasurable film full of tactile impressions and genuine emotion. When Mangolte enters Mexico and finally meets Martin Lassalle, it seems one of cinema's great discoveries.