The art blockbuster

Artists and film have an uneasy relationship. Few ventures since Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali collaborated on Un Chien Andalou in 1929 have achieved more than cult status. The advent of smaller handheld cameras in the Sixties suggested greater possibilities. Andy Warhol pitched his tripod in front of the Empire State building in 1964, and filmed it for a deadpan eight hours. Some regard this as a classic of the superficial era that Warhol lived and understood so well. But who can claim to have sat through it? I'm a big Warhol fan, and I haven't.

Art and film is an affair founded on great promise but scant fulfilment. I remember talking to Jeff Koons in the late Eighties when he was planning his own movie. The most successful artist of the moment, he was convinced that his route to immortality lay in making a porn flick with his wife of the time, La Cicciolina. In my naivety I mentioned that we didn't do hardcore in Britain. He was having none of it, and proclaimed that we would be seeing Made in Heaven, as the film was to be called, opening in Leicester Square the following year. It never happened.

Time moves on. In the early 21st century, though they haven't made it to the Warner West End, a series of remarkable films by established artists are being shown in cinemas or on television. These are elaborate, big-budget productions. Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, which is being screened at the Brixton Ritzy this week, has been 10 years in the making. In the quick-fix world of contemporary art, the seriousness and advanced scheduling of film goes almost against the grain.

Barney is a performance artist and sculptor. Like Steve McQueen, the 1999 Turner Prize-winner whose new work is screening at the former Lumiere cinema, he has been making films for most of his professional career. Jeremy Deller, whose Battle of Orgreave was shown on Channel 4 last Sunday, has previously worked in video, only recently turning to film for his collaboration with movie director Mike Figgis.

There is a clear distinction between these films and the kind of video installation one sees in many galleries. Video is a gift for the artist interested in a "quick take". It's cheap, instant and demands little technical expertise. But video can't do it all. Now that we expect to see video installations at art shows, we have developed a facility to ignore them. Our attention span in the gallery is limited, and the consequence is that the video format becomes more of a texture than a narrative.

Barney's Cremaster Cycle, particularly the most recent, Cremaster 3, (the numbering is confusing; there are five films made out of sequence) is a monumental vision, taking in Celtic lore and modern American culture. It begins at the Giant's Causeway and ends at the Chrysler building.

It's an art movie, composed in every frame, but it addresses contemporary urban myths and even takes on some of Hollywood's favourite genres - from musicals to gangster movies. At times Barney's films resemble surreal versions of those genres, but they differ from conventional cinema, eschewing dialogue for a more operatic feel, with an underlying musical score.

There is no single narrative running through the cycle, but the viewer can easily tease out themes, often centred on the visual motifs, or the image of Barney himself - he is a key performer in all of the films. The effect upon the viewer is cumulative rather than direct, but never wilfully oblique.

There is a grand shape to the whole thing. It's a compendium of images from contemporary culture - from the mass production of motor cars to the high art of the Guggenheim Museum, whose spiral interior Barney climbs as if it were a rock face at the climax of Cremaster 3. But it requires the viewer to connect some of the dots. It's understandable why Hollywood wouldn't risk such an enterprise. Nevertheless, what is striking about it is how at home it looks in the cinema.

Steve McQueen's films don't have the scale of Barney's, but they still test the limits of film on a more intimate scale. He's presenting two new films at the empty shell of the former Lumiere cinema in St Martins Lane - where audiences settle into the space at strict starting times on the hour, despite the lack of conventional seating. Both Caribs' Leap and Western Deep take a single motion as their entire structure.

The first film shows beach life in Grenada, by the spot where local people jumped to their deaths in 1651, rather than surrender to the French. We see nothing of the horror in this scene. But after half an hour, the audience moves to the another space, for the second feature, to witness a disorientating, frightening, descent into one of the world's largest coal mines. Although quite distinct works, their themes echo each other.