Since its inception, artists have been fascinated by cinema, but the past twenty years has seen an intensification of direct engagements with mainstream cinema, forming a compelling body of artists’ film that, as yet, shows no signs of completion. These engagements are diverse and range from the silent single elongated quotation that is Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho (1993) to the surreal pastiched imitations of Bollywood and Western genre conventions in Shezad Dawood’s Feature (2008) and often involve transposing aspects of cinematic exhibition into the gallery space. This book proposes to critically map, categorise and examine this substantial and expanding body of work, building on the insightful criticism initiated by a spate of major survey exhibitions from the mid-1990s to the 2010s, but going further to designate it as the site of a new film avant-garde, one that interrogates dominant film forms, their cultural impact and resonance.

By discussing the work of emerging artists such as Jesse Jones and Rachel MacLean alongside that of more established artists such as Matthew Barney and Candice Brietz, this book intends to reinvigorate the existing canon of ‘cinematic’ artists films. In addition, by identifying a range of theoretical frameworks, the chapters of this book produce insightful analyses that aim to enliven discussion beyond an interest in individual works or artists. The book is divided into two sections, each of which focuses on one of the two principal formal approaches taken to engagements with cinema; namely sampling and imitation. Each section is then divided into three chapters that identify, define and examine different themes and formal strategies that connect various examples of artists’ films. Examples of chapter titles are: ‘Found Footage as Feminist Poetics’; ‘The Documentary Turn in Contemporary Art’; and ‘Deadpan and Other Types of Dissonance.’