Most studies of art in cinema tend to approach the subject from the perspective of medium specificity and/or intermediality. William Chapman's Films on Art (1952), Charles Eidsvik's Cineliteracy: Film among the Arts (1978), Gary Edgerton's Film and the Arts in Symbiosis (1988), Philip Hayward's Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists (1988), Nadine Covert's Art on Screen: A Directory of Films and Videos about the Visual Arts (1991), and John Walker's Art and Artists on Screen (1993) were among the first studies to consider the ways in which film mediates, and is mediated by, the other arts. These general studies have since been enriched by theoretically sophisticated analyses of: film's pivotal role in the development of modern art; the phenomenological affinities between cinema and painting, cinema and architecture, cinema and sculpture, cinema and photography; institutional histories of cinema and the museum; representations of the museum in cinema; cinematic and museal strategies in the representation of history; the role of art documentaries in the development of visual literacy; the ideological ramifications of dominant stereotypes about art and artists; the cultural economics of “artist-enterprises” and the mediatization of the artist; the commercial film production of artists and the experimental film production of moving-image artists; the visual arts practices of various film auteurs; the role of art in history films; the “cinematic turn” in contemporary art and the emergence of “movingimage art”; the reimagining and recycling of Hollywood iconography in contemporary art, and so on.

In her seminal studies of the relationship between painting and cinema – Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (1996)– and of the intersections between art history and film theory – The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (2002) – Angela Dalle Vacche explores the rich pictorial sources of films by Godard, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Antonioni, Rohmer, Murnau, and Minnelli, as well as the particular ways in which different arts map the senses. Along similar lines, Brigitte Peucker's Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995) foregrounds the intermedial relations between cinema and the other arts, drawing attention to the ways in which films regularly figure the encounter between painting and literature (or “the literary”) in terms of adultery, incest, miscegenation, vampirism, and bisexuality.