Marina Abramovic has been called “the grandmother of performance art,” although she’s as youthful as ever in Matthew Akers’s fascinating, visually crisp documentary portrait, which tracks Abramovic’s celebrated 2010 MOMA retrospective. The Serbian-born artist made work in the 1970s concerning the limits and conceptions of the body that have long since become part of the modern art canon, yet she still continues to athletically press at the boundaries of performance art. Granted a yearlong all-access pass, Akers captures Abramovic’s many selves as she stages this major exhibition. The MOMA show, titled “The Artist Is Present,” was a marathon spectacle in which Abramovic faced viewers singly, silently—gathering ever more fervent followers along the way. Akers’ camera also captures her posing glamorously for fashion magazines; in guru mode, training young artists to enact her early work; sick in bed using chromatic therapies; domestic while cooking pasta; and emotionally raw while reconnecting with her former art and life partner, Ulay. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present confidently meets built-in challenges, giving the oft-reviled, ephemeral medium of performance a sympathetic, mainstream platform and humanizing a woman who defies age as easily as stereotypes. The documentary befits its subject: It’s a sleek, unerring look in the eye of an extraordinary artist.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle review "The film gives us a full sense of a personality and intelligence so riveting that we begin to comprehend why all those hundreds of thousands lined up at the MoMA." "'Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present' documents [a] remarkable achievement . . . and serves as a thoughtful introduction to the career of the woman who has called herself the 'grandmother of performance art.'"

TRAILER


105 min. Photographed by Matthew Akers. 98 min. Distributed by Music Box Films.
Tickets $9 for SFFS members, $11 general, $10 senior/student/disabled. Box office now open online at sffs.org and in person at SF Film Society Cinema.