ABSTRACT
Documentary films about Marina Abramović blur the lines between the products of mass media and performance art documentation. This chapter discusses four films, from Murray Grigor’s film for Channel Four, The Great Wall of China: Lovers at the Brink (1989), to Marco del Fiol’s The Space In Between: Marina Abramović in Brazil (2016), arguing documentary films are an important vehicle for the dissemination of Abramović’s performance and aesthetic in addition to her biography. Philip Auslander’s work constellates several issues around the hierarchal relationship of live performance to its documentation through the categories of the theatrical and documentary. Through their engagement with her performances, Abramović documentaries challenge Auslander’s categories, requiring an expanded phenomenology of performance documentation that recognizes how documentary film fuses and expands the theatrical and the documentary, as art works and ethnographic events converge. I define the category of cinematic documentation to account for and describe this unique approach to performance documentation.
