BALKAN BAROQUE :

Balkan Baroque
PIERRE COULIBEUF (1999)

com
MARINA ABRAMOVIC








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BALKAN BAROQUE: SYNOPSIS

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).


STATEMENT

Here and now

In the film Balkan Baroque, one has the impression that the character invents the past as she speaks, here and now. This past seems to have no reality outside the moment it is evoked with the force that is characteristic of film work. Here, in Balkan Baroque, it has become the present, the present of the film unwinding before the viewer's eyes.

What we see on the screen is in the process of happening-it is the very gesture that is given to us and not a report on it. The universe of the film is given in a perpetual present. In other words, this biography of Marina Abramovic, which implies a number of past things, is in process of unfolding before our eyes, here and now, as we watch Balkan Baroque. 'Elsewhere' and 'formerly' do not exist. There is no longer a true reality, inherent and external to the film, so there is no longer anything but the sole reality of the projected images. The film, the universe that it reveals, suffices by itself, at every instant, erasing itself as it goes along, within a loop that is literally never-ending.

We are therefore dealing with a subjective, mental unwinding. The work Balkan Baroque is not account of an exterior reality; it is its own reality. The only time to be considered for this biography is the projection time (63'). Balkan Baroque is pure fiction, an imaginary production in which Marina Abramovic plays different roles, including the role of the artist doing performances.


CONCEPTS

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 ima-ginary. Thanks to this distance, this interval, Marina Abramovic appears behind multiple masks. The film scoffs at representation and scrambles the codes.