Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Matthew Akers. The camera trails the artist who calls herself the grandmother of performance art as she builds a career retrospective at New York's MoMA — the biggest the museum had ever staged.

At the heart of the 2010 show sat the piece that gives the film its name: Abramović held a chair across an empty table, day after day, and let any visitor sit opposite and meet her gaze in silence. The hours added up past seven hundred. Some smiled, some wept. And when Ulay — her former lover and collaborator from the 1970s and 80s — took the seat, the whole room froze. Akers cuts the moment so that it raises the hairs on your neck without a word spoken.

The film shows how a body and raw time become an artist's material, and it doesn't hide the cost — the exhaustion, the doubt, the physical pain. James Franco, Orlando Bloom and magician David Blaine drift through the frame. A strong way in for anyone who once wrote performance art off as a stunt. Stream Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present online on iFILM.