THE COLD EYE (MY DARLING, BE CAREFUL)
With Kim Ginsburg, George Deem, Powers Boothe, Saskia Noordhoek-Hegt, Ella Troyano, James Barth, Maggie Grynastyl, and Valda Setterfield.
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The more singular view of The Cold Eye makes us immediately aware of how arbitrary the film image is. As Cathy’s attention wanders during a conversation, the image may shift from the face of her friend to a seemingly random part of the room–a book, a part of the floor. By including these images, and giving them as great a weight as the head shots, Mangolte reminds us of the arbitrariness of human attention. Further, as we look at a part of a rug, we reflect on the fact that all film images are arbitrary constructs. In a conventional feature, although the images that advance the narrative may not seem arbitrary, they are as much a product of a subjective consciousness–the director, or the group that made the filmas the images depicting Cathy’s wandering vision. But Mangolte’s first-person camera technique offers its richest rewards not as a general commentary on cinema but in its depiction of a specific consciousness, in the way the camera and sound help us come to know Cathy’s thought processes.
Mangolte has confessed dissatisfaction with some aspects of her film, particularly some of the acting. It is true that only one of her actors was professional, and at times one sees the woodenness of an amateur reciting lines. But The Cold Eye actually gives us a much deeper vision of an individual’s psychology, and of her reaction to her milieu, than most professionally acted features. What other films must present through narrative construction and a skillful actor’s performance, Mangolte presents cinematically, through editing, composition, camera movement, and sound. Rather than developing a feeling for a character, an empathy brought about by traditional acting techniques, in The Cold Eye we come to feel what it’s like to be inside a character.
Mangolte shows us not only Cathy’s interactions with others but also those moments when her eye wanders from the face of a friend. A group of images is cut together to convey this almost unintelligible visual meandering: it is as if she lacks her own inner alternative to the complexities of another’s consciousness. Mangolte represents Cathy’s shifting attention with nearly random views of nearly empty spaces. Just as she can define her painting only in terms of its materials, so she will often react to intelligent conversation in the same way she reacts to boredom, with a wandering eye.
