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Cinema drew artists from its earliest decades. Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy made the abstract short Ballet Mécanique (1924) from kitchenware, machine parts and a woman's smile, and Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel opened Un Chien Andalou (1929) with a razor and an eye. Film stars became subjects in their own right: Andy Warhol built his Marilyn Diptych (1962) from a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe, repeated until it fades.

Later artists turned to the grammar of film itself. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) cast her as heroines of films that never existed, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Theaters series keeps the shutter open for a whole screening, so the screen burns white. Douglas Gordon slowed Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) to last a full day in 24 Hour Psycho (1993), and Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) edits thousands of film clips into a working 24-hour timepiece.