Experimental Cinema: Structures, Systems and Strategies

This project explores a range of structures, systems and aesthetic strategies that several British film and video artists have invented and developed in works spanning the late 1960s to the present.

Since the 2000s, contemporary artists have used film, video and moving images as readily as painting, sculpture and other mediums that have a much longer tradition, but artists’ cinema goes back to the 1920s at least.

The history of the field has run in parallel to modern art and cinema. Often it has been characterised as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ because it tests so many of the built-in assumptions and expectations associated with commercial cinema, television and moving-image media. Critics and commentators have debated the value of the term ‘experimental cinema’, but its ongoing relevance corresponds with the notion that it tests numerous aspects of the moving-image and its perception.

While methodical strategies in experimental cinema go back to the first avant-garde films that were made a century ago, the premise of this project is that the most thorough formal exploration of cinema can be credited to a generation of artists that began making films in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. It involves a close analysis of the films and videos of numerous influential artists including Peter Gidal, David Hall, Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson, Jayne Parker, Lis Rhodes and Guy Sherwin, paying attention to their recent and lesser-known work as well as ‘canonical’ films, videos and expanded cinema.

Several of these figures have had careers spanning many decades. Looking at their work over that period will reveal the changing preoccupations of these artists in relationship to the development of film, video and digital moving-image technologies and different modes of spectatorship.

The project also attends to the work of younger generations of artists, including Neil Henderson, Jennifer Nightingale and Simon Payne (colleagues in film and media at ARU). The work of these and several other contemporary film and video artists have developed structures, systems and strategies that directly relate to those of their predecessors.

A significant lineage in experimental cinema can be uncovered by looking at the work of different generations of artists and their connections. Their pursuits constitute a form of critical practice that has underpinned some of the central preoccupations of artists’ film and video, which continues to test our understanding of the moving image.

The research for this project draws on interviews that Simon Payne has conducted over several years, many screenings that he has programmed and introduced at numerous international venues (including Close-Up Cinema in London, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and Wavelengths in Toronto) as well as the prior publication, Film Talks: Fifteen Conversations on Experimental Cinema (London: Contact, 2021) co-edited with Andrew Vallance.

Outputs

The primary output of this project is the book Experimental Cinema: Structures, Systems and Strategies by Simon Payne, which will be published by the British Film Institute/Bloomsbury in 2026. It has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

An accompanying website is also forthcoming. This website will be a repository of links to many of the films and videos that are discussed in the book.

A series of public film screenings will also accompany the book.