“You know what is interesting?” posits Marina Abramović. “After 40 years of people thinking you’re insane and you should be put in mental hospital, you final actually get all this acknowledgement. It takes such a long to take it seriously.” As the artist speaks, she’s having her hair styled, for yet another performance. From stage to art installation to interview ad back again, Abramović is, as MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach explains, “never not performing.” As she presents this process in the outstanding documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present—which premieres on HBO 2 July—you become aware of not only of how she conceives and plans a show (for instance, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, for which she sat with audience members, one at a time, for seven hours a day, six days a week, from 14 March through 31 May 2010), but also how she conceives of time, how bodies occupy and endure it. “Marina is an artist that visualizes time, using her body in the space with the audience,” says Biesenbach. “By the mere duration, she brings time in as a weight, a weight on the performer’s shoulders taking a piece out of the performer’s life as a value.” At the same time—so to speak—the performance showcases that viewers also perform, and that your experience is a function of time, produced by time and in time—present, for a moment, anyway.

See PopMatters’ review.

At the start of Putin’s Kiss, Masha Drokova calls Russia’s then-Prime Minister “The role model for the person I’d like to share my life with, because he’s a very strong, charismatic, and intelligent man.” She knows this, she asserts, because she met him once, and felt their “spirits were kindred.” As she speaks, she looks young and enthusiastic, an ideal leader of Nashi (Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement), which she joined in 2005. But over the course of Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary—premiering 1 July on PBS—Masha comes to see both herself and her idol differently. In part, she comes to her new insights through her work with Nashi and its decidedly self-interested founder, Vasily Yakemenko. And in part she comes to them when she meets a group of journalists, including Oleg Kashin, who introduces himself by saying, “I’m an independent journalist and I don’t support the ruling power.” The film’s tight focus on Masha’s transformation reveals how a limited view might be forced to open out, that is, gradually. In this process, both trust and distrust are hard to assert.

See PopMatters’ review.

With Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, Pamela Yates returns to Guatemala, nearly 30 years after the release of her 1983 documentary, When the Mountains Tremble. Premiering on POV 28 June, the documentary begins with a section called “Chronicle Foretold,” delving into the case being built in a Madrid court (the same court that indicted Augusto Pinochet) against two of the generals charged with perpetrating a genocidal campaign against the Mayan people of Guatemala. Estimates have it that 200,000 Mayans were massacred during this war, by a government and military that claimed to be fighting communism, but was also consolidating power. When, in 2005, the extensive secret police archives are discovered by accident, the case seems to take a turn. Granito weaves together Yates’ involvement with the court case and two other narrative threads—the digging up of Mayan Disappeared’s remains and a rumination on Yates’ own naiveté concerning the ultimate effects of such excavations. At the same time, it makes a broader, frankly tragic point, that proof can’t always lead to justice.

See PopMatters’ review.

“I guess I’m one of the first to be famous for not being famous.” Pausing to reflect, Chris Crocker isn’t so much explaining his popularity as he is describing the phenomenon of YouTube. And that description isn’t so much ongoing as it recalls a moment, way back in September 2007, when his immediately memed-out video, “Leave Britney Alone!” first landed on the web. “Broadcast yourself,” YouTube invited all comers in 2005, another long-ago moment when the parameters of celebrity—or maybe just the speed—changed. According to the documentary Me @ the Zoo, premiering on HBO this week, the website made it possible for users to measure one another and themselves by hits, to perform and judge, parody and adore, all the while refashioning the very idea of what it means to be a star. Or maybe just a person with fans.

“Health care providers have become agents for financing.” Back in 2010, Andrew Cuomo, then New York State Attorney General, announced that his office was opening an investigation into health care credit cards. By the time Cuomo appears in a news clip, about halfway through the new Frontline episode, Dollars and Dentists, his point is past obvious. What’s to be done about the problem is less clear. Correspondent Mile O’Brien here focuses on dental care. More than 100 million Americans don’t receive regular—or even intermittent—care because they can’t afford it, having no dental care insurance, a number that includes some 19 million children. When patients become desperate and do seek care, they’re usually relying on Medicaid, a payment source too frequently not accepted by dentists because it is reimbursed at something like 20% of costs. Increasingly, the widening void between no care and urgent care is filled by corporate dental chains, financed by private equity. And increasingly, O’Brien reports, chains like Kool Smiles or Aspen Dental, find ways to profit.