Since the mid-1990s there has been a persistent tendency in artists’ films to enlist both textual and contextual aesthetic attributes of conventional narrative cinema, often involving direct sampling from film texts. Critical appraisals of this work diverge; some lament its cynical collusion with the glamorous dream-factory while others argue for its criticality.
This paper briefly explores three examples of artists’ films from the past twenty years that use various methods of sampling: Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho (1993), Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) and Candice Breitz’s Him and Her (2008). Subjecting the original text/s to obsessive scrutiny, each of these works can be said to inscribe a range of ‘neurotic symptoms’ on the film surface that reveal Hollywood cinema’s unconscious assumptions. Far from being critically apathetic, this paper argues that such artists’ films effect a pointed critique of Hollywood cinema and popular culture in general.