NEW YORK—On a screen in a darkened room, a young girl appears, pale as a ghost, with knotted red hair and enough red lipstick for two. She sits on the edge of a mattress, lit from behind, the faces of American celebrities staring out from posters on the deep green wall. There is an almost tangible lushness to the images, which are handsomely composed and infused with painterly light, even as the girl grows more fragile upon seeing the face of a man dissolve before her eyes. By all appearances, the work could be a major motion picture. Pull back, however, and the setting is not a movie theater but the Gladstone Gallery, in New York.

Shot on 35-millimeter film and lasting 20 minutes, Shirin Neshat’s Zarin (2005) is representative of an increasingly popular art form. Some call it art film, others time-based work or simply moving imagery. Call it what you will, the work is one that adopts the language and methods of cinema yet stands as a discrete object of art. Artists aren’t just building upon traditional mediums—as in 89 Seconds at Alcázar, Eve Sussman’s three-dimensional exploration of the Velazquez painting Las Meninas—they are employing professional actors, film crews of 60 or more, elaborate lighting setups and a variety of formats, from 35-millimeter film to high-definition video, to create remarkably slick, sumptuous images that were previously found only in Hollywood releases. Few people are even making distinctions between film and video anymore as digital technology becomes the most prevalent way to display the work. 

Neshat, an Iranian-born artist who primarily explores issues of Muslim society, cites as influences directors known for their contemplative, richly visual work, such as Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky and Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai. She’s not alone. For more than a century, artists have found inspiration in motion pictures. Many of the early modernists—from Futurists to avant-gardists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Hans Richter—were smitten with the cinema. The current Tate-organized exhibition “Dali: Painting and Film,” which opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on June 29, demonstrates Salvador Dali’s belief that the immersive quality of film was very much in keeping with the intensely subjective states that intrigued him, where emotions could shape and color the images. That, in turn, inspired a number of his most important canvases, six unrealized film scenarios and collaborations with such filmmakers as Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.

“I don’t even think it would be possible to cite the number of artists who have been influenced by the cinema,” says Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. “Yet there’s a disconnect between what artists are drawn to and what curators and collectors are drawn to. Because I don’t see that many cinephiles among dealers and curators.”

Indeed, despite the fact that film and video have now colonized virtually every corner of the art world, from museums and biennials to collectors’ homes, the essence of this kind of work as an art object remains stubbornly difficult to pinpoint. The art market is defined by the selling of unique commodities, yet in this case, it’s trying to harness, package and sell something that is by nature a mass medium. Film and video’s dominion over pop culture is increasingly absolute, thanks to ever-expanding consumer technologies like laptops and iPods. “This is a highly complex medium,” says Iles. “There are so many divergent paths in terms of artists’ intent, technology and approaches that it’s actually impossible to pin this thing down. It’s like trying to pin jelly to the wall. You just can’t define it, because it’s constantly changing and evolving.”

Hirshhorn Museum curator Kerry Brougher sees a marked move toward “the cinematic,” a characterization that could apply equally to video pieces, digital renderings and even animation—anything that employs such movie techniques as narrative tropes, shot-countershot camera setups and strategic editing to convey its content. “The cinema and its offshoots—television and the Internet—reach to the core of our culture,” says Brougher, whose two-part exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image” opens February 14 and showcases the work of 40 contemporary artists working with film and video. “Because of that, the boundaries between real life and make-believe are becoming less defined. A lot of the artists in the show are interested in that idea.”