Well and deservingly known as cinematographer for such people as Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, News from Home) and Yvonne Rainer (Lives of Performers, Film about a Woman Who...), Babette Mangolte takes over the director's seat for this study of a young female painter trying to find her bearings in the forbidding New York art world. The film is a rigorously controlled experiment in subjective camerawork (Mangolte serves as her own cinematographer), with an intensely analytical script by James Barth, which should ring a few bells with anyone involved in any kind of art work, not just painting. What emerges is an unsparing portrait of an artist -- a portrait in reverse, as it were, looking at its subject from the inside out. The one severe, but not fatal, flaw is the prissy speaking voice of the ubiquitous unseen heroine. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.