Ideas and debates current in art have often influenced the shapes and forms of artist film.

The emphasis placed on the significance of those materials and processes which contribute to the creation of the art object, so important in modernist ideas of sculpture and painting, became the focus of an approach amongst artists working with film in Britain in the 1970s.

The availability of cheap printing and processing equipment through art colleges, workshops and collectives such as the London Filmmakers' Co-op encouraged artists during the 1970s to experiment in a hands-on way with different methods of producing an image. Methods included the introduction of dyes and techniques of solarisation at the point of printing, and experimenting with different stages of filming, printing and refilming. By altering the material in these ways film-makers such as William Raban and Malcolm Le Grice sought to challenge the authenticity of the filmic image as portrayed in mainstream commercial cinema. Whitchurch Down, for example, demonstrates the mutability of the film image, by altering it through shifts in colour and ambiguous reprinted imagery. By showing how a single repeated image can be transformed during its production process Le Grice opens up the question of how film is capable of manipulating the viewer with a multiplicity of different messages.