Cinema and the visual arts are closely connected from the start. The Lumière brothers have been presented as the ultimate impressionists and the medium of film corroborated the modern ‘impressionist’ and ‘fragmented’ view of the world, which had been appropriated or developed by modernist painters. In so doing, film contributed to a modern culture of hyperstimulation of the senses, which also was one of the foundations of the idea of modernism and the art of the avant-garde. In light of this, it is incomprehensible that, even still today, film is almost absent in the curriculum or scope of most art historians and art critics. To a large extent, this is simply the result of obstinate institutional traditions. As an academic phenomenon, film studies usually developed within the context of departments of literature or communication studies outside the realm of art historical research. Still today, many art history students are initiated into the visual arts of the twentieth century without any reference to Murnau, Vertov, Godard or Bazin. Many art history textbooks seem to ignore the fact that canonical artists such as Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson have used film as an inherent component of their artistic practices and that leading art historians such as Erwin Panofsky, Rudolph Arnheim, Pierre Francastel or Henri Focillon have written seminal essays on film.