Artists' Films

The book about why contemporary artists make films and how cinema gets into museums.
The book by David Curtis, a British specialist in art cinema, fills an important gap in art studies, located between professional cinematography and visual art. These are films united under the concept of 'niche' cinema, as well as videos, installations, and multimedia works by artists of the 20th and 21st centuries — not only painters, sculptors, representatives of pop art, land art, conceptual art, but also amateur filmmakers and 'craft' directors who have bet on independence from the commercial tasks of the film industry and the spirit of experimentation. Their searches are not limited to image and plot: they touch on the whole world of cinema — from production and shooting technologies, manipulations with film, light, color, sound, screen, cinema hall, and viewer to reflections on the status of the film and its author. David Curtis groups the extensive material — films by more than four hundred authors from around the world — thematically, leaving room for attentive observations about cinematic art and its creators.