Opening
Program  Installation
Program
1 Program
2-3 Program
4-5 Program
6 Program
7 Program
8 Program
9 Program
10 Program
11 Program
12 Program
13 Program
14 Closing
Ceremony
Program VIII: Performance
Art in Motion: Marina Abramovic / Meredith Monk
Balkan
Baroque (63min, 35mm, 1999) France
Directed by Pierre Coulebeuff
Choreographer
Marina Abramovic
Experimental
fiction. The autobiography, both real and imaginary, of Marina
Abramovic, Body Art artist. The film composes the life aesthetic
of a woman in her era, with a personal history strongly marked
by the Yugoslavia of Tito, everyday violence, the experience
of physical and psychic limits... The voluntary evocation of
the past makes something more secret, more intimate crop up:
an unknown evolution that is embodied in fictions felt like
authentic fragments of truth. Balkan Baroque jumps from one
identity to another, from a true story to an imagination, from
a dream to a ritual... - the language of the body often taking
over from the word, interrupting it or, on the contrary, stimulating
it. (All the images in the film are original, whether inspired
by performances or purely imaginary).
Marina Abramovic
was born in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) in 1946 and currently lives
in New York. In the early 1970s she was part of the ‘body
art’ movement. She uses her body as material in performances,
‘what touches the body, what allows the body and mind
to attain a higher degree of awareness’. Between 1976-88
she has worked with her companion, Ulay and received an International
Grand Prize, at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997.
Filmmaker and artist, Pierre Coulibeuf was born in Elbeuf (France)
in 1949 and currently lives in Paris. He has completed doctoral
studies in Modern Literature. Coulibeuf's works lie within a
research approach to contemporary creation. In a cross-disciplinary
relation to film genres (fiction, experimental...), as well
as to modes of presenting the image in motion (35mm projection,
installation, photography), his ‘simulacra-films’
invent a place or a language on the borderline of the other
arts, critiquing established forms and questioning representations
of reality. Since 1987, he has made short and feature-length
films based on the universes of Pierre Klossowski, Michelangelo
Pistoletto, Marina Abramovic, Michel Butor, Jean-Marc Bustamante,
Jan Fabre, Meg Stuart...
His films have been selected in many international film festivals
(fiction, experimental, video art) ; his films are also exhibited
in the contemporary art area. He has been artist invited in
the International Pavillion, Bienniale of Contemporary Art of
Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil 2005. His works are part of main
public collections: Centre Pompidou, NBK Berlin, Media Art Sammlung
Goetz, Munich, GAM, Torino. The Pompidou Center will organize
a retrospective of his films in January 2007.
Filmmaker’s Note:
At the outset of the project, there was my encounter with a
woman endowed with an exceptional physical presence. Marina
was potentially an actress. Balkan Baroque takes its inspiration—in
part—from performances by the artist (in particular, the
performance piece Biography) but, in a more profound way, the
film transposes the mental universe of Marina Abramovic.
Balkan Baroque is guided by several principles: discontinuity
(black and white as structuring elements); ritualisation and
frontality; fiction (and not the documentary).
The black of memory, from which arise the white images of the
past (the artistic rituals). The images from memory are combined
with fancies, fantasies and dreamlike waking images, as well
as rituals of life (the kitchen, the dining room, the gymnasium...).
The discontinuity of memory, which blends images from the past
with imaginations, life rituals with artistic rituals. Depending
on its visual component, the film becomes the equivalent of
an ‘involuntary memory’, with its breaks, its oversights,
its absence of chronology. Thus, one can consider the film of
the image and the film of the chronological, narrative voice.
(Thanks to the form of statement, the narrative voice gives
rise to other images in the spectator’s mind.) The visual
and sound components are autonomous and constitute the audio-visual
image. But the visual image and the sound image communicate
with each other in an underground manner, with numerous effects
of resonance.
The performances are adapted — in other words, transformed
by the cinematic point of view (the shot imposes its law; Marina
Abramovic becomes an actress). In the film, they take on a mental
appearance, like memory-images or insistent, shimmering images
that suddenly force their way through, climb as far as awareness
and dilate the present.
Balkan Baroque creates a character whose identity is multifaceted
and continually inventing itself. In this sense, the film creates
its own reality, standing ‘on the borderline’ between
real and imaginary, without one’s truly knowing what is
real and what is imaginary. Thanks to this distance, this interval,
Marina Abramovic can appear behind multiple masks, scoff at
the performance and constantly scramble her identity.
“Book
of Days” (74min, 35mm, 1988)
Director/Music/Choreography: Meredith
Monk
“I have never made a dance film per se, but the fact
that my films are for the most part nonverbal and nonlinear
in structure naturally relates them to an art from that speaks
without words.” – Meredith Monk
“Book of Days” is a film about time, drawing parallels
between the Middle Ages, a time of war, plague and fear of the
Apocalypse, with our modern times of racial and religious conflict,
AIDs, and the fear of nuclear annihilation.
Meredith Monk
has been performing since the mid-1960s, composing, choreographing,
and performing her work both solo and in larger groups. She
is equally noted for the quality of her voice and the way she
uses it in speech and song, creating music for a capella voices.
Other elements of her work are dance, ritual movement, lighting
effects, and small props. In the slender genre of dance/video,
Monk been cited for her skill and understanding of both mediums,
and the tape Ellis Island, made with filmmaker Bob Rosen, has
been praised as “one of the most stunning dance videos
to date.”
Opening Program
Installation
Program 1 Program
2-3 Program
4-5 Program
6 Program
7 Program
8 Program
9 Program
10 Program
11 Program
12 Program
13 Program
14 Closing
Ceremony
© Kinodance–Russia, 2006
akovgan@kinodance.com
|
|
