Performance Art Movies

A selection of Survival Research Laboratories early performances, a must for those interested in how such an enterprise ever got started in the first...

Bas Jan Ader hangs from the branch of a tall tree, until he loses his grip and falls into a river below.

“In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he...

Art dealer Salvatore Viviano and director Angela Christlieb embark on a search for the lost artist collective Gelitin, which since the 1990s has...

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically...

A lonely character braving a steep mountain attempting to reach its peak. As he journeys the mountain, he is forced to confront a plethora of...

Shot in his garage-studio, the camera records Ader painstakingly hoisting a large brick over his shoulder. His figure is harshly lit by two tangles...

A collaboration between filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira and performance artist Thomas Pinnock, who performs his "immigrant folktales" using traditional lore...

A ritual about"memory". The words and phrases written on the paper are easy to understand but difficult to define, substituting the usual "...

A man leaves his quiet life in the country to become a comic entertainer in the Big City. His journey is a Surreal celebration of the descent into a...

When the daughter of a controversial performance artist inherits her late mother's home archive, an unexpected visitor comes to claim the most...

Turtle Dreams, produced for WGBH-TV, originally aired September 2, 1983. Shot by Ping Chong. Composed by Meredith Monk, performed by her and her...

Purfled Promises was a work of expanded cinema. Two neo-drag entities entered the cinema and held a screen in front of the auditorium's red curtain...

A sincere portrait, and in first person, of the multifaceted Andalusian artist José Pérez Ocaña.

A re-creation for film of Meredith Monk's seminal dance/theater work incorporating film and original music, voice, guitar, and audiotapes. Originally...

Life and art intersect on a spectacular Newfoundland farm where visual artist Colette Urban mounts thirteen art performances in the fields and barns...

Marc with a C is the stage name of Orlando indie/DIY singer-songwriter Marc Sirdoreus and was formally a persona enacted on stage for over 20 years....

One of a series of ‘falls’ by Bas Jan Ader that he recorded on film, this work was filmed in West Kapelle, Holland in 1970.