This Christmas, enjoy art through cinema

Not long ago we brought you a few examples of how cinema manages to bring scenes from canvases to life. But the seventh art also has a soft spot for turning the lives of those creators into frames.

Here are two films that illustrate masterfully how, either way, art can be the best lead of all. They are Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013) and Marina Abramovic: The artist is present (2012). Both from Karma Films.

In the first one, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch reproduces, as exquisitely as he does faithfully, thirteen paintings by the brilliant Edward Hopper (New York, 1882-1967). He does it through Shirley, a determined, nonconformist woman who has to fight against the ideas of her time. This is the turbulent America that runs from the thirties to the early sixties. That stretch of American history works as the backdrop for staging Hopper's brushstrokes. The sequences capture the utterly personal ways in which he portrayed the American way of life, leaving us, in Shirley: Visions of Reality, images of his painting in its purest state.

The second title is a documentary about the pioneer of performance art, Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1956). Directed by the American Matthew Akers, it digs into both the personal and the professional side of the Balkan artist's life. On the one hand, it reveals her origins, her concerns and her intimate side, even looking at her relationship with fellow performance artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, Ulay. On the other, it goes over her more than forty years of work, with which she has redefined the very idea of art. One of the high points of the film is when it records how Abramovic faces what may be the most important moment of her career: the retrospective of her work at the MoMA in New York (2010). For almost three months she sat on a chair seven and a half hours a day, letting the public take the one opposite. Marina Abramovic: The artist is present is, without a doubt, an excellent portrait of one of the most controversial and influential artists working today.

Would you like to see them? At KARMA FILMS and ARTELISTA we're celebrating the DVD release of Shirley: Visions of Reality with a giveaway of 5 DVDs of each film. To take part, all you have to do is leave us a comment with your favourite art-related film.

Go on, tell us which one it is!