The film Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (see below) focuses mostly on the presentation of her exhibition. In this article I would like to look deeper into Marina’s personal experiences during the whole process.

I saw Marina in Park City at least 5 times. She attended various workshops, meetings, stayed after movies to talk to other filmmakers and she was always very talkative, especially about her own exhibition.

The most important and many times repeated claim was that she would never ever go through this again. It required too much physical and mental strength from Marina; moreover she believes that it would never have the same affect on people as it did back then.

In the beginning organizers were very anxious of what would happen if nobody would dear to sit in front of Marina and the chair stayed empty? Marina herself took the decision to sit in front of an empty chair and wait for someone to come. However, this (that it was empty) never happened during the whole 3 months period.

It is interesting that no one limited the time a person could sit in front of Marina during the exhibition. In the film one can see that people changed constantly, but that was not the case. Some people sat for couple of minutes, while there were people who stayed there for hours. There was one person who sat in front of Marina just when museum opened its doors and stayed for 7 hours when he was forced to leave by security guards. Another person came three times and waited for about at least 5 hours each time to spend just moments with Marina. She later commented that she felt an unbearable sorrow coming from that person and was happy to help him to break away from it.

Journalists kept asking Marina: How is it impossible to affect strangers so much in such a short period of time? Some people would be crying, some laughing, some would be very thankful or sometimes they even wouldn’t be able to walk away and needed assistance.

It wasn’t an easy task for Marina. She believes that the main key lies within the emotional state of mind. According to her, in the absence of any kind of emotion the gaze mirrored back the initial emotions of the people, thus showing them the real inner self.

Marina was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to complete the task. The hardest issue was to be in a present time the whole time. Fridays would be almost unbearable, because it would be 10 hours of sitting instead of 7 as usual.

That needed not only mental but also physical preparation. It took Marina one year to complete this process. She went to India to clean her body and changed her diet, since she didn’t have lunch for 3 moths and that could cause serious health problems. She also trained her body not to want to go to a toilet during the whole day and to cope with gradually increasing physical pain.

People waited for hours and hours even slept outside MOMA just to get in.

Marina herself felt mostly touched by the security guards. She told that there are 65 guards at MOMA and many of them would come on their free days as regular visitors and would wait in a line just to sit in front of Marina.

It is unbelievable how many people were touched by this exhibition. They created groups on Facebook and still meet to discuss it. There was even Marina’s support team that came from New York to Sundance to tell others about their unforgettable experiences.

Report from Sundance Festival 2012

When I finally got to Park City it was sunny, white and very cold. It was the 22nd of January, Sunday and I suddenly realized that I came too late.

But let’s begin where it all started. Along with the Sundance Film Festival arriving in Park City so did a snowstorm. After many cars got stuck on a highway, roads were finally closed and many people were forced to head back to Salt Lake City and overnight there.

However, the stormy weather did not seem to bother them that much. Broadway theaters in Salt Lake City were full; people had to wait at least one hour to get their tickets but still were very enthusiastic.

Waiting

I have heard about long queues at Sundance before, but reality hit me when I finally got to the Box office in Park City. Ticket packages were sold out way before festival started and open tickets to films were already taken during the first days of the festival. The only way to see films were to go to the venues 2 hours before the screening, pick up a waiting ticket and then come back no later than 30 minutes before the screening hoping to be lucky to get in.

There are a lot of interesting hidden things behind this whole Waiting list idea. First of all, theaters are highly spread in the Park City, so the distances from one theater to another can be up to 30 minutes walking or even more. There were shuttle buses but you never knew how long it would take you to leave the theater and come back. Therefore most of people would come to a theater 2 hours prior to the screening and would stay there.

Theater venues are far away from the ones in Europe. For example Theater MARC stands for Municipal Athletic & Recreation Center. What I am trying to say is that for 2 hours you were stuck not in a nice waiting lounge with small tables drinking café latte, but in a huge tennis cord sitting on the floor and watching people on the first floor running laps.

Pass holders would be the ones to come last and get in first. Then it was the turn of the ticket holders and only when everybody would be seated, people with waiting tickets had a possibility to buy a ticket to the film. Sometimes 10 people would get lucky, sometimes 55… you could never know. The only thing you could do, was to wait.

During the week people started talking and more or less everybody knew which films had better chances to win. That meant that if you wanted to see one of the ‘better’ movies you had to come to a venue 3 hours before the screening, because there would be already around 50 people waiting in a line when staff members would start giving out the waiting tickets 2 hours prior to the screening.

I must admit that it was rather tiring experience but very funny at the same time. People were extremely friendly, talkative and helpful. I would talk and discuss movies all the time, but I guess majority had a slightly different agenda.

Networking

When I looked again in my binder where I saved all the papers from Sundance, I was amazed how many business cards I have had collected in one week. I have no idea who Scott, John or Andrew is and it is not because I wouldn’t be interested in people when I met them. On the contrary, I am very curious in general. It just looks like that many people came to Sundance to give away as many business cards as possible. After the magical sentence: ‘I am from Europe’ almost in all cases a person would start looking for their business card immediately. Please don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against networking. I just noticed that during the Sundance it was so important that when I would start discussing one or another particular film, people would start looking for another ‘victim’ to introduce him/ or herself.

Superstars and Goodie Bags

Park City has only one Main Street. This street is full of shops, restaurants, bars, cafes etc. I met many people who said that they came to Park city not to watch movies, but to walk around, meet some famous people and to shop. However, ‘to shop’ is not the right word to use in this case. People were keener on getting things for free. Main Street offered everything: free coffee, free lunch, free mugs, free water bottles, free ice cream, free drinks- you name it. Parties began at 10 in the morning and ended late after midnight. During these parties I met filmmakers, producers, actors and other celebrities and could finally talk about films!

By getting up every morning no later than 7 o’clock and going to sleep around 3 o’clock in the night I managed to see a lot of documentaries and I will share my personal opinion about them as well as info Behind the Scenes with pleasure.

Photo: Juste at Sundance (Abra Cohen)

A gift to filmkommentaren and its readers! Juste Eigminaite from Lithuania contacted us to offer texts from her US documentary festival tour that started at Sundance and will go on until end of June. Below you can see the lists of festivals that she will visit.

Juste Eigminaite has a bachelor at Roskilde University, Denmark in Communication and Cultural Encounters, and a master at Copenhagen University in Cognition and Communication. She is 28 years old and came to Denmark when she was 20.

She ”is interested in documentaries for many years and I am deeply in love with people in general. I praise Danish documentaries for very distinctive storyline and Eastern European films for the poetic film nature. I love films that have both: a poetic film with a strong storyline. The best recent example would be ”How to pick berries” by Finnish director Elina Talvensaari”.

The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQNo-06pEg0

Photo: Juste Eigminaite