MUSE Film and TV

The Program for Art on Film was a joint venture of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust. It was established in 1984 to foster new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and moving-image media.

Between 1987 and 1990, the Program for Art on Film commissioned fifteen short films and videos through its Production Laboratory. The Lab was conceived as an arena for inquiry and experimentation — a means of exploring and expanding the cinematic vocabulary of films on art. Each production was designed as an extended collaboration between a filmmaker and an art expert and was intended to explore the issues of collaboration in content-driven filmmaking, seeking new approaches that might influence future films on art.

The ART ON FILM series of DVDs presents the results of the Production Laboratory in their original context: as experiments. The broad range of film subjects illustrate a variety of approaches and interpretations. And, while these films ask to be judged as works of art in their own right, they also should be understood as parts of an ongoing dialogue about the cinema’s role in communicating art history.