High art cinema: The artist’s feature film

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the recent wave of feature-length film productions directed by visual artists. Financed largely by public art institutions and state cinema funds, the ‘artist’s feature film’ is a phenomenon unique to the past fifteen years; although precedents can be found in the American art scene of the 1990s, the contemporary trend of artists’ feature production gestures towards something different and more specific. Defined by a ‘crossover’ ambition to reach audiences both in cinema and in contemporary art, and circulating largely through channels of mainstream and arthouse cinema, the artist’s feature mobilises its high-cultural stature as a key selling point during promotion to film and art crowds alike. It signals the artist’s transition into the film business – not with the aim of challenging its methods and mechanisms, but to participate in them. Concluding with an analysis of the vexed reception in the popular press of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), the article suggests that artists’ features do not come without their contradictions and ambivalence.