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Marina Abramovic collaborated with videomaker Charles Atlas on this striking work of autobiographical performance. Abramovic delivers a monologue that traces a concise personal chronology. This brief narrative history, which references her past in the former Yugoslavia, her performance work, and her collaboration with and separation from Ulay, is intercut with images of Abramovic engaged in symbolic gestures and ritual acts—scrubbing her feet, staring like Medusa as snakes writhe on her head. Closing her litany with the phrase "time past, time present," Abramovic invokes the personal and the mythological in a poignant affirmation of self.
Marina Abramović
Charles Atlas
Also Directed by Marina Abramović
Ulay and Abramović take turns hitting each other in the face, gradually increasing speed and intensity with each blow. This performance is best known for being the inspiration for New Order's "True Faith" music video.
Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."
In a small house with oversized furniture, located in a rice field in Asia, some children wearing army clothes and weapons, start playing war, creating between each other two armies and using children's toys, laser weapons, machine guns and helicopters. Slowly, as the game progresses, they start imitating war scenes as seen on TV, such as negotiations and death scenes. At the end of the film, the children are coming out of the house and they deposit their weapons in front of it. The smallest child comes out in the end with a burning bramble stick in his hand and lights the pile of weapons. All the children leave while the pile is burning. In over twenty countries around the world, children are direct participants in war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in current armed conflicts. Dangerous Games is a work of fiction.
7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a continuation of Marina Abramovic's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century as her life was beset by struggle and scandal. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles - in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma - followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself.
The video tape shows the half-length portraits of Abramović and her husband Ulay standing opposite each other, looking at each other and producing a long sound with open mouths.
"Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose which one of us to face" – Marina Abramovich
Combining video, performance art, documentary, and tableau vivant, this short piece set in what appears to be part of the Ayutthaya Ruins in Bangkok, Thailand, begins with a panoramic shot of various Thai folks dressed in traditional garb and sleeping in the grass as a woman narrates. The rest of the piece is broken into six unbroken shots of these individuals in still poses depicting both some aspect of Thai life as well as suggesting its disquieting alienation from modernity, as the same woman narrator now sings. The final shot is again of the ensemble sleeping, suggesting that the previous montage was, indeed, a collective dream.
Balkan Erotic Epic explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.
I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat 'Art must be beautiful', 'Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face.
20 short films about human rights.
Also Directed by Charles Atlas
Lady Bunny at the end of the world.
Check Your Body at the Door is about the remarkable underground House dancing in NYC's golden decade - the 1990s.
Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in film and video for over four decades. Atlas has extended the limits of his medium, forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Throughout his production, the artist has consistently fostered collaborative relationships, working intimately with such artists and performers as Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Mika Tajima/New Humans, Antony and the Johnsons, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as in-house videographer for a decade from the early 1970s through 1983; their close working relationship continued until Cunningham’s death in 2009.
Charles Atlas’ five-channel video installation, Tornado Warning, draws from the filmmaker’s early memories of the tornado alerts in his childhood town of St Louis, Missouri. The piece contrasts an orderly space of grids and numbers with a chaotic environment of found images cut from old films, news footage, and the Internet. Ordinary objects fly around an empty room, swirling abstractions dominate the walls, and distorted bodies dance over images of radio waves. Seemingly in motion, the space of Tornado Warning appears unruly, alarming, violent and relentless.
"For me Rainer Variations is a hybrid: a weave of impressionistic portrait, found footage construction, and video sampler. Aside from formal issues, Yvonne Rainer’s knotty process of thinking, her unique brand of humor, and her engaging presence are the things that were foremost in my mind as I worked on the tape. What I hope will emerge from this process is an interrogative portrait of an artist for whom I have great respect and affection." --Charles Atlas
PBS produced documentary about Sonic Youth at the height of their powers in 1988
“Westbeth” was Cunningham’s first video collaboration with Charles Atlas, and the first video project to be made at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio on the eleventh floor of Westbeth.
In 2006 Antony and the Johnsons and Charles Atlas took their collaborative performance TURNING to major cities in Europe. This documentary film explores the heart of that performance.
Coast Zone, a video-dance collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, was shot in the vaulted Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Released in 1983.
Based on his own video documentation, Atlas constructs a delirious montage of New York club performances from the late 1990s. Impersonators of pop-culture figures, including Martha Graham, Kurt Cobain giving a "final performance," and Sid Vicious lip-syncing to Nancy Sinatra, are emceed by two matronly (and bitingly sarcastic) upper-crust women. Featuring legendary drag, transgender, and queer artists, It's a Jackie Thing celebrates the flexibility of performance art's boundaries: "high" and "low" culture, "good" and "bad" taste, amateurism and professionalism, and, ultimately, gender and identity.