By Glen Helfand

THERE WAS A certain thrill whenever the A.V. person carted the 16mm projector into the bungalow classroom. We may have been seriously preadolescent, but we all knew there was something a lot more magical about seeing The Red Balloon, that starter foreign film they used to show in elementary schools back in the day, than about having the teacher drill us on our arithmetic. This was in the days before the more self-contained VCR-and-monitor setup, and those movie interludes were our first encounters with film as an object, as a phenomenon of projected light. There was the sound of celluloid whirring through the projector (and the hope that one day you'd get to thread it up!), the leader numbers going through their rhythmic circular dance, the exciting moment when the stock unthreaded, or perhaps even got stuck and melted before our gleeful, horrified eyes. When the film canisters sat on the teacher's desk, the classroom was transformed into a movie theater, and we liked it.

These days a similar kind of movie-day delight has been spreading to museums and galleries. They are increasingly being transformed into alternative and experimental screening rooms, into sites where the influential nature of cinema is explored in its own creative terms, by artists. Or by filmmakers who have turned to art settings to expand their medium into more experimental territory. More than one person has compared the current "Documenta," the global über-important exhibition that unfolds in Kasel, Germany, every five years, to a film festival because it has so much film and video work in it. Not everybody feels so enamored of that idea. "If I wanted a film festival, I'd go to a film festival," one disgruntled art maven told me.

In the Bay Area there are currently film-related gallery exhibitions in at least four major venues: cinematic Christian Marclay and Yoko Ono at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "The Film Art of Isaac Julien" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, T.J. Wilcox at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, and the group "Film Show" at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery. They feature various forms of the projected image – recycled, recombined, theoretically mused upon – and they feel oddly at home in these art contexts. Darkened rooms with single or multiple screens are perfectly comfortable settings for any modern-day person who consumes visual information. It may have been going on for some time – we need only look back to Andy Warhol's film projects of nearly 40 years ago, currently being reconsidered in his retrospective exhibition in Los Angeles – but the concurrent appearance of so many movie-oriented art projects is making museums feel more and more like multiplexes. The nature of what they're screening, however, is elusively positioned between the populist appeal of movies and the contemplative, highbrow nature of art. The reviews aren't conclusive.

These simultaneous exhibitions are confluence enough to justify declaring "film art" a trend, for all that's worth (whatever happened to the big promises of digital and Net art?), but perhaps more important, these programs signal a shift in the meaning and use of specific cultural sites. The division between popular and high art has evaporated enough to allow for a comfortable hybrid of both. Perhaps it's because the glamorized glow of film has completely seduced the art world – after all, it is safe to say that everybody wants to make a movie. These days, as Apple's iMovie software attests, everybody can. Developing digital-video technologies and laptop-computer editing programs are making the prospect much more affordable and the process more hands-on for artists. The playing field is wide open, perhaps facilitating a need for more and more venues of exhibition. While streaming online video has yet to take off as once promised, museums are becoming a viable venue in which to see cinema that challenges the form. It's no stretch to say that film is the new painting, in that it's the medium that most everyone understands and can enter into a critical dialogue about.

There is, however, a difference between the ubiquitous video installation and film art. New video technology allows for a visual slickness that has more to do with movies than classic art video, which had some roots in a Portapak anti-aesthetic, as a medium in which to document physical performances in ethereal black and white. Often this practice aimed to comment on or combat the hegemony of Hollywood conventions, but to look at such work today often generates a longing for production values.

These days, post-MTV, when design students study motion graphics as a matter of course, dynamic beauty is not only available but also expected. In the book New Media in Late 20th Century Art, Michael Rush makes the assertion that during the 1990s the influx of affordable digital cameras and Avid editing technology created a pervasive "cinematization of video." Video makers could emulate the large-screen viewing experience by using a laptop computer. Marclay's stunning Video Quartet, now at SFMOMA, is an extremely cinematic collage composed of thousands of film clips recombined using an inexpensive editing program. The piece plays like a big-budget experimental epic but reportedly was modest in its budget.

It's this sense of scale that sets film art projects apart. Movies feel big; they have production values, sweep, and the magic of light pouring through state-of-the-art projection systems. They're things to be experienced, which is a primary attribute of what museums offer their public: a place to engage in a visual phenomenon. There's a distinct pleasure that comes from the art direction and expensive photo finish of a summer blockbuster – though these things usually bring a lowest-common-denominator disappointment for those who hope for sophisticated character or narrative development. It's the kind of aesthetic pleasure that is perhaps analogous to the joy of encountering a good painting. There are also scads of photographers who have appropriated the expansive, set-dressed look of movies in still photographs. Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, for example, in very distinct practices, pour tidy sums into creating fantastical sets, elaborate lighting, and makeup to compose a single frame that contains a full film's worth of narrative and production values. Cindy Sherman has managed similar feats on much cheaper budgets, channeling the spirit of actors into a set of gestures, eyeliner, and cheesy costumes.

In contemporary life, film's seamless movements, its edits and time-based reach are part of a visual vernacular that's commonly understood. Shirin Neshat's sweeping visions of the Middle East on the surface resemble David Lean epics yet deal in symbolic narratives about gender in a specific culture. It's easy to enter into her short stories, even if they're unconventional and allegorical.

And what must it mean when Matthew Barney, a sculptor whose primary medium is film, is perceived by many to be America's most important living artist? While his work is not universally adored, it's a fact that his Cremaster cycle of films, while cryptically symbolic, is monumental, a term that used to be more applicable to sculpture. When his first film, Cremaster 4, was screened in 1994, in tandem with a New York gallery exhibition of "props," I for one was blown away by the scale. It's an elaborate 40-minute project featuring aerial photography, special effects, exotic location shots (on the Isle of Man), elaborate costumes, and even computer graphics, all indicating a budget lurching toward the millions

The film seemed bigger, and more expensive, than anything that had come before in the art world. It was an epic work that grew even more epic with each of the four subsequently released films, which showed not at the cineplex but in the international network of museum auditorium screening rooms. The latest and final installment, Cremaster 3 (2002), however, debuted in a Manhattan movie palace. The three-hour horror movie-inspired opus seems to have been foisted on the world like a real movie. It was reviewed in the New York Times by Stephen Holden, a film – not art – critic, and he discussed Barney's film in the context of current Hollywood fare. "In its invention of a self-contained mythological world and its fondness for actors wearing masks and prosthetic make-up, it suggests a loopy, highbrow response to the 'Star Wars' cycle. To my eyes, at least, the Cremaster films convey a sense of antic adventure and playfulness that all but vanished from the 'Star Wars' movies beginning with The Phantom Menace." (Barney even got a celebrity mention in Entertainment Weekly for being the father of Björk's next child.)

It's worth noting that George Lucas's recent offerings have gone digital in production and projection. Doubtless, these developments will soon overtake the industry, but perhaps they're all the more reason why artists are dealing more with classic images of celluloid. Film stock is now a seemingly precious material, one that, while outmoded in the technical sense, is ideologically eternal. To both filmmakers and artists, 35mm film stock will always seem like a gold standard, a fetishized format. Using actual celluloid may be impractical and expensive for some artists, while DVDs that play out continuously in galleries offer a way to efficiently emulate the feel of film.

Some artists, however, revel in using actual film. In the exhibition of works by T.J. Wilcox in the Berkeley Art Museum's Matrix gallery, the darkened room contains a couple of whirring old-style projectors that throw narrative film collages onto freestanding movie screens. The artist, who has a growing art-world reputation, is interested in using the gallery setting to tap into the increasingly precious magic of actual film. Wilcox makes short films that deal with classic, epic stories and big historic personalities (Roman emperor Hadrian, Marie Antoinette, Marlene Deitrich) yet are short and modest in scale and exude a seemingly handmade sort of funkiness. They're a conglomeration of filmmaking methods, edited together from 8mm film, transferred to video, and ultimately bumped up to 16mm for gallery presentations. Wilcox's films are becoming increasingly popular on the gallery circuit, where they are sold in editions, like a traditional print.

Yet at the same time, they're very much about film and its exhibition context. "When you walk into a theater, you know you're going to see a type of narrative," Wilcox told me in a recent interview. "I think film is a more complicated medium than that. I'm attracted to showing my films in a gallery space, as they're dedicated to critical thinking. I'm attracted to them because they're uncommon sites for film."

Wilcox also admitted he's not interested in making feature films, that he's happy with his status as a working artist. Isaac Julien, an artist who crossed over into filmmaking for most of his career and who's crossed back over into the art context, seems to have taken the process in the opposite direction, moving his practice as a maker of experimental films, features, and documentaries into the realm of gallery presentations that allow for the poetry of his work to unfold slowly, in repeated viewings, or to become more physical visions shown on curved walls or in fractured multiple-screen formats. Julien's aesthetic is slick and lush, relying on the burnished feel of aging black-and-white stock or the eye-tickling saturated color of a classic Hollywood musical. Yet his projects diverge from the entertainment model by addressing serious, intellectualized issues of cultural and personal identity as they relate to desire.

Somehow such aspirations seem tailor-made for the galleries, where the proverbial white wall is intended to create a frame and buffer for contemplation. Julien, who began as a visual artist, also has recurring images of galleries, as well as a repeating curator character who has appeared in more than one of his films, again facilitating a smooth transition into museum space.

Julien traces his use of different exhibition contexts to the expectations of audiences. "Things began to shift as it became much more difficult to make work in a festival context," he told me. "The audiences became quite normative; they wanted to see feature films, with traditional narratives and a lot of closure. I realized there was a fluidity and freedom in the gallery context that I didn't have in the cinematic arena. In a museum you begin to see something differently. I wanted to actually do something that would be surprising and different."

But can artists turned filmmakers and directors turned artists maintain that level of surprise once the idea of presenting films in galleries is a convention? SFMOMA's new-media department has slated for next year an exhibition of installations by beacons in world cinema – Atom Egoyan and Abbas Kiarostami among them – and the museum's architecture-and-design arm will mount a show exploring depictions of American domestic architecture in popular films from the 1930s onward. Both sound appealing and pertinent, but surprising and different? The bottom line is that film is the form of the 20th century. Now that we're on to the 21st, it makes perfect sense that it would enter into the canon, like poetry and painting. And the appeal of that has few boundaries.