Whether it involves remaking an old Hollywood movie, projecting a quiet 16mm film, or constructing a bombastic multi-screen environment, cinema now takes place not just in the movie theatre and the home, but also in the art gallery and the museum. The author of this engaging study takes stock of this development, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and the ramifications it has for art and cinema alike. Through the lens of contemporary art history, she examines cinema studies' great disciplinary obsession - namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future.

Once at the margins of the art world, film now occupies a prominent place in museums and galleries. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art explores the emergence of cinema as a primary medium of artistic production, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and its ramifications. Erika Balsom also tackles cinema studies' great disciplinary obsession--namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future. Rich in theoretical reflections and critical analyses, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art offers insights into the whole history of cinema from the vantage point of today's art.

Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.

Since the 1990s, a cinematographic turn has taken place in contemporary art, paralleled by the emergence of a cinema of exhibition. This collection of new essays investigates the relationships between the white cube and the black box, focusing mainly on the 1970s, a decade in which film practices and moving images were integrated into museums and art spaces. The authors analyze multiple modalities of presenting the moving image through historical case studies: the anatomy of video art, expanded cinema, artists' films and installations, and the moving image in the public sphere. Exploring examples from the 1930s to the present, these contributions address commercial, spectacular or advertising forms of moving images, artists' performative practices, installations in large museums, exhibitions devoted to projections and festivals of experimental films.

With an innovative and strongly interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book offers an extensive investigation of the use of audio-visuals in exhibition design.

As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic from the immateriality of the film screen, separating it into its physical components within the gallery space. How do film theorists read these reformulations of the cinematic medium and their critique of what it is and has been? Theorizing Cinema through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema considers artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configurations of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, thereby addressing the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. Taking film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposing it with artworks that render cinema as a material object, this book unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have often been seen as virtually incompatible, heightening our understanding of each and, more pertinently, their interactions.