By: Meg van Huygen

As part of The French Institute Alliance Française “Crossing The LIne” Festival, films by Pierre Coulibeuf were shown. In Balkan Baroque, Parisian visual artist and filmmaker Pierre Coulibeuf put a fresh spin on the documentary, a medium that usually doesn’t get too messed around with.  The film follows Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslavian performance artist who explores the limitations of the human body as she vacillates between daydreams and real memories via short, weird scenes in a white room.  Some are more brilliant than others — she draws a star around her bellybutton with a razor blade; she sits quietly in a wooden throne with a python draped over her face; she eats an onion like an apple in extreme close-up while moaning in discomfort; sometimes she just lies on the floor and screams her face off.

By itself, all of this would basically amount to the student film from The Ring; the only reasons it’s a documentary at all is Abramovic’s narrated timeline of her entire life over the images.  Abramovic was born in Belgrade in 1946, she tells us as she chooses from a selection of knives and stabs the floor in between her fingers, jailhouse-style, occasionally missing.  Her mother joined the Communist party when she was small, we learn, while she’s being mud-painted by a woman in a sari.  We are told of her father’s death, the Balkan wars, her move to Amsterdam, and the break-up of a major relationship, wherein she and her lover traveled to opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, began walking, met in the middle, and said goodbye.  Each fact is presented in a simple, declarative sentence.

A little eye-rolly at first, sure, except Abramovic kind of grows on you, perhaps because of who she is, perhaps because it’s compelling to be told a story in such an incongruous way.  A comparison could be drawn to the juxtaposition of two separate scenes: one in which Abramovic vigorously, painfully scrubs her feet with a wire brush, and another wherein she sits in a stairwell and scrubs the stairs in the same manner.  Coulibeuf places them well apart, but the metaphor isn’t lost in the distance.  The same motions mean different things in different contexts.  A middle-aged woman writhing around on a bed of ice can be pretentious if it’s in silence, yes, if you don’t know anything about her past and her present…as long as you like that sort of thing.