Digital Video magazine — September 2012
Performance, Perspective, Production: Crafting ‘Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present’

HBO’s Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present provides a view into the world of one of the most compelling artists of our time as she prepares for her celebrated 2010 retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Directed and shot by Matthew Akers, and produced by Jeff Dupre and Maro Chermayeff, the documentary feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and received the audience award at the Berlinale in February, followed by a limited U.S. release leading up to its HBO debut this month.

The film was first conceived at a dinner party, where Dupre became smitten with the Serbian-born Abramović as she outlined her vision for her forthcoming performance retrospective. The exhibition would not only re-create past performances, but also include a new, original work that would mark the longest duration of time that she performed a single solo piece. Although initially a skeptic of performance art as a medium, Dupre enlisted the equally skeptical Akers on the project, and within a week the renowned artist had handed over the keys to her apartment to the filmmaking team.

“Marina is completely fearless in all areas of her life. We told her we were still on the fence about her work and that we were sort of trying to come to better understanding of it, and that there was no guarantee the film was going to be all positive. And her response was to give us the keys, to give us complete access,” Dupre explains. “The thing that’s extraordinary is that she took such a huge risk in the MOMA show by performing this new piece. It would have been so easy for her just to have it be about all her past work, but she decided to do something that really could easily fail, and so that really upped the ante for us.”

“I wasn’t out to comment on Marina’s myth, but I also wasn’t out to make a hagiography,” says Akers, a graduate of the NYC School of Visual Arts. “So initially, for me, the intention of the film was just to try to make the best film possible, the most entertaining film that would be for the widest audience possible, and not just for the rarefied art world.”

The first-time director followed Abramović for 10 months, through six different countries, documenting her life relentlessly and gaining unprecedented access to MOMA in the weeks prior to and during the exhibition. “MOMA became great collaborators with us,” Dupre comments. “They really bent over backward to give us as much access as they could.” (Read full story…)