The attraction of film as a medium for artists, and the influence of the visual culture of cinema in shaping modernism is tacitly acknowledged in art history, although rarely explored in detail. Since the 1970s, a growing number of publications have explored experimental film and artists’ moving image internationally, yet only a handful consider film in relation to other media before the 1960s. Those that do mention Britain only briefly or focus on continental European or North American work. Consequently, the complex interrelations between art and film in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain remain largely obscure.

This thesis catalogues and analyses – via historicist and formalist methods – how film form, theory, technology, architecture, discourse and ephemera influenced artists working in Britain between 1900 and 1940, focusing on activity in London. It makes detailed case-studies of artists who made work in a range of media in dialogue or in parallel with cinema and traces the evolution of ideas of film as art in texts written during the period in question.

The first part, Artists’ Film explores how artists approached the cinema both as a subject and as a medium. In chapter 1, this is considered in relation to historic genres and materials of art via the work of Walter Sickert and Walter Booth, while in chapters 2, 3 and 4, it is considered in the context of competing visions of modernism via the work of Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Edward Wolfe, Hubert Waley, Dora Carrington, Barbara Ker-Seymer and Edward Burra, alongside criticism by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf and Iris Barry. Closing this section, chapter 5 explores the way film was associated with psychology in Close Up, lending significance to the individual viewer’s perception of a film, and thereby raising the possibility that film art could be conceptual more than material. The second part, Art After Film explores artworks that are influenced by and intersect with the attributes of ‘film art’ so far defined. Chapter 6 surveys the work of Oswell Blakeston and his circle and their attempts to render cinema through means other than film. Chapters 7 and 8 explores primarily abstract works in a wide-range of media made by artists including László Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, S. John Woods, Arthur Jackson and John Piper. The significance of Herbert Read as a conduit bringing European ideas around film and art to Britain is also considered. Part three, Film After Art explores works that sought to extend these uses and meanings of film art, and did so by positing a ‘life-ly’ dimension to film, at times connecting with the surreal and at others with the organic. Works by Humphrey Jennings and John Banting are the focus of chapter 9 and works by Len Lye and Paule Vézelay are discussed alongside the neo-vitalist discourse surrounding biomorphism in art in chapter 10.

In foregrounding the intermedial, collaborative and experimental practices omitted from existing art historical accounts, the thesis finds a dialectic with film to run throughout modern British art. It connects the contemporary rubric of artists’ moving image to more extensive historical, material and theoretical precedents, and it suggests possibilities for further research into artists’ engagement with film in the period 1945-1965.