Programme 3

The Sky on Location
Babette Mangolte
United States, English, 1982, 78 min

During the gold rush years, the construction of the railway and manifest destiny, a phrase that would go on to be the premise of many westerns became popular, “go West, young man, and grow up with the country”. Grow, progress with the country. A year before Reagan won the election, Babette Mangolte travels by car through the far west and sees with her own eyes the landscapes of the myth and other, anonymous landscapes. She frames them, shows them to us. We appreciate the emotion they already contain, a consequence of the art of Ford, Mann and company, as well as the new emotion the new film provokes. Seeing them, surely someone will remember more nineteenth-century, North American phrases, such as: “Nature never wears a humble appearance”. But the country progressed and its non-native inhabitants destroyed the landscape that gave them their identity. They keep destroying it. A brief stop in Eden, the primary forests of California, sequoias, hemlocks, red cedars, Douglas firs, give shape, colour and dimensions to the loss. The white men could not stand the darkness, at level with the ground, of that world so unique and indifferent to them. And they made clearings. And then came decades of private property, industrious industries of agriculture and timber, a forest only has value when cut down, etc. If the rest of the species were so comfortable watching and waiting like Babette Mangolte, we could still save ourselves.