Film Screening

Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Nedre gate 7, 0551 Oslo, Norway

Babette Mangolte presents a lecture dealing with the issues of landscape films and the concept of wilderness. As a part of her presentation, she will screen The Sky On Location, a 16 mm film (78 min) shot in 1982, in which Mangolte approaches the question: is it possible to confront nature with a real purity of vision? The film, show at several international film festival among which were the Edinburgh Film Festival (1983), Toronto Film Festival (1983) Berlin and Cologne (2005), is a personal mediation on the landscape of the American West. The Sky On Location tracks the ruling conception of nature in the 19th and 20th centuries from the pioneers through the 'instamatic' tourists while obsessively following the four seasons. Ernest Larsen writes about the film: 'the elemental vicissitudes of the weather, the exact moment of the day, the colour of the light and the soil and the trees form an acute visual record of the constantly changing mood of the landscape – the film successfully attempts, with quiet, passionate, almost single-minded firmness, to confront us as nakedly as possible with our cultural inability to see nature whole, without preconceptions.'