The idea of collaboration is one that rarely diverts a conventional film from its construction.

In artists' film, collaboration is usually much more self-conscious and some of the best sound work had been produced in conjunction with a filmmaker where the musician and the filmmaker's approaches can coalesce in an intelligent and sympathetic exchange.

Where convention suggests that music is illustrative of action and is secondary to image, the best artists' film goes beyond this idea and the process behind the filmmaking is mirrored in the musical landscape. Malcolm le Grice's Berlin Horse is a perfect illustration of this. The two looped pieces that make up the images of the film are choreographed expertly with Brian Eno's looped score. The musical process mirrors exactly the process behind the images. The collaboration forms a complementary exchange which works together as the presentation of independent ideas and not as illustration.

This idea of musical exchange has had great seminal impact beyond artists' film. Music promos now often borrow a lot from this type of partnership so that films are made to sympathetically express music rather than simplistically illustrate their content. A new form of collaboration has evolved where literal artistic exchanges have been replaced by exchanges in ideas between different mediums.

The female voice through song has been a recurrent element of Nina Danino's films, leading to collaborations with performers such as Shelley Hirsch, first in the devotional film Now I am Yours and then in the haunting Temenos. Part Moorish, part Catholic, the haunting laments sung by Danino's mother in Stabat Mater evoke the roots of ritual and Christianity. By contrast Sarah Miles uses familiar popular songs from film and pop culture to draw upon the collective memories of family history in 2001 Family Odyssey: Ophelia's Version and to states of mind in Damsel Jam. In Amearu Fallout 1972 her collaboration with the singer PJ Harvey restages the well known song When Will I See you Again? as a poignant hymn to home for two Japanese girls stranded in Dorset. Breda Beban goes so far as to stage an East End musical. Jason's Dream has been described as 'if an Eastern European Jacques Demy with pronounced contemporary sensibilities had been let loose in present-day London.'