The documentary chronicles Marina Abramović re-performing well-known performances from the 1960s and 1970s – by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself. Abramović exposed her body to public view for seven hours every day for a week at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Following the series –from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces– the documentary insists on details of Abramović’s body, so as to show how the art of performance entails both physical fragility and unlimited endurance. It also explores how the attentive audience fed into her art and aesthetics, was viscerally affected and actively participated, experiencing some kind of transcendental experience.

Babette Mangolte (1941) is a French-American director, cinematographer, photographer and artist who has lived in New York since 1970. She has worked as a cinematographer with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer and has made important experimental films on the very act of looking about the American landscape, about contemporary dance and the art of performance. She is considered one of the most important artists of the American avant-garde and currently teaches at the University of San Diego in California.

Photos: Marina Abramovic performing Entering the Other Side at the Guggenheim Museum, November 15, 2005. © Marina Abramovic. Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.