Hall of mirrors

Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors explores the complex and profound relationship between cinema and the visual arts in the postwar era. It examines how art has shifted toward film, how film has been influenced by art, and how the two have fused into new forms of artistic expression.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Art and Film features work by more than one hundred of the century's most remarkable filmmakers and artists, such as Joseph Cornell, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Richard Hamilton, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Raul Ruiz, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Stan Douglas.

The book's seven essays range widely over themes including Hollywood glamour and stardom, the experimental cinema of the sixties, the influence of psychoanalytic and feminist film theory on art, nostalgia for cinema's golden age, and presentiments of its fragmentation and death. The dialogue between art and film returns frequently to cinema's origins, splintering and re-arranging into new, self-reflexive experiences that highlight and subvert film practice.