Since its inception, artists have been fascinated by cinema, but the past thirty years has seen an intensification of direct engagements with dominant cinema, forming a compelling body of artists’ moving image. These engagements use strategies of sampling and imitation that range from the single elongated quotation that comprises Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho (1993) to the densely intertextual imitations of Rachel Maclean’s Over the Rainbow (2013). Divided into two parts, one focused on sampling and the other on imitation, this book critically maps this substantial and expanding body of work, identifying a series of common thematic and formal approaches to better understand artists’ ongoing dialogue with dominant forms of cinema.

This study sits in the field of visual culture studies and draws from art history, aesthetics and feminist, cultural, and postcolonial studies to construct an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that elucidates the intertextual strategies of writing back into and against old stories in the works discussed. By including work by younger artists such as Jesse Jones alongside that of more established artists such as Steve McQueen, this book reinvigorates the existing canon of artists’ moving image that takes cinema as a key source. What distinguishes it from other studies is its contention that the point of interest for the work examined is not cinema (and its history) per se, but what its evocation as cultural archive can illuminate about the legacies of the past in the present.

The principal insight of this research is that sampling uncovers suppressed or latent meanings hidden beneath the surface of the original, whereas imitation provides opportunity to include those aspects that were altogether excluded. The works discussed in this book use cinema to explore the limits of imagination within systems of visuality and representational conventions, and simultaneously advance propositional forms of redress that centre different forms of subjugated knowledge.