A scene from Shirin Neshat's debut film, Women Without Men. (Mongrel Media)

The Surrealists flirted with it. So did the Beat Generation. But it crystallized with Andy Warhol, as is often the way. In 1963, the famed pop artist ventured into directing with Sleep, a six-hour film of his then-lover John Giorno dozing. For decades, artists have been looking to film for new challenges, new avenues.

Sam Taylor-Wood and Shirin Neshat, two of the most popular art photographers and video artists working today, are attempting mid-career crossovers into film.

While the art world’s migration towards mainstream filmmaking may seem like a natural transition, it has often been fraught with failure. For every Hunger (Steve McQueen), there’s an Office Killer (Cindy Sherman); for every Basquiat (Julian Schnabel), there’s a Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo). Now, Sam Taylor-Wood and Shirin Neshat, two of the most popular art photographers and video artists working today, are attempting their own mid-career crossovers into film.

The Iranian-born Neshat set her debut film during the 1953 coup d’état in her homeland. Based on the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, and opens April 2. Meanwhile, Taylor-Wood touches on notions of celebrity and mortality in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (which premiered in Toronto at Canadian Music Week in March, and will be released in theatres on Oct. 15).

It can be difficult to forget the person behind the camera when you’re looking at work by either of these artists. Now based in New York, the 53-year-old Neshat has been held up as a spokesperson for Middle-Eastern Muslim women, and has consequently been exiled from her country of birth. On some level, all of Neshat’s photographs and videos deal with the strictures of gender in Iranian society. The tension is strikingly played out in her split-screen trilogy, Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor (1998-2000), where men (in blindingly white shirts) and women (in black chadors) come up against each other without ever really meeting.

The image of the chador is used over and over in her works — it’s an icon that gains resonance given Neshat’s increasingly vocal preoccupation with the outsider’s perception of Iran and Islam since 9/11. In the opening scene of Women Without Men, a chador is cast from a rooftop and floats through the air, betraying none of the psychological weight it carries for the thrower. In another scene, a prostitute’s cornflower-blue covering stands out against a sea of keening women swathed in black, setting her spectral shape even farther apart from society than she already is.

The 42-year-old Taylor-Wood, on the other hand, is the former it girl of the Young British Artists group. She survived both colon and breast cancer, was married to art dealer Jay Jopling and is now engaged to — and pregnant by — 19-year-old rising actor Aaron Johnson. Taylor-Wood’s use of celebrity to explore iconography has long drawn attention to her art. Robert Downey Jr. played Christ to her Virgin Mary in the large-scale video Pietà, while Tim Roth, Jude Law and Paul Newman were among the many males to weep on command in the photo series Crying Men. Perhaps her most notorious work is an hour-long filmed portrait entitled David, commissioned by London’s National Portrait Gallery, of a snoozing David Beckham. Not only does it show the soccer supernova in an intimate situation, it echoes Warhol’s Sleep as well as Michelangelo’s David.

Visitors to London's National Portrait Gallery watch a film by Sam Taylor-Wood of soccer star David Beckham asleep in bed on the day of its unveiling in April 27, 2004. (Reuters/Peter Macdiarmid)

It’s no surprise that an artist so preoccupied with idols would choose to tackle the (early) life of Lennon. Nowhere Boy is a decidedly user-friendly biopic that still has enough signature flourishes to keep some of the faithful interested, though the truly devout will likely be disappointed by the film’s conventional approach.

Raised by his stern aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott-Thomas) after being abandoned by his parents at a young age, Lennon (Aaron Johnson) is a rebellious Liverpool teen who hates school but loves rock and roll. When his free-spirited mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), re-enters the picture, his life becomes a chaotic mix of music and intense maternal affection, all of which lays the groundwork for the founding of the Beatles. The film’s straightforward chronology allows Taylor-Wood to focus on detailed production design and getting pitch-perfect acting from her three leads. Taylor-Wood excels at portraits, and her carefully framed shots of faces in life and in sudden, swooping death (the only kind in this story) keep Nowhere Boy from falling in with standard biopic fare.

While Taylor-Wood is often driven by the female gaze directed towards men, Neshat’s women are looking in, at themselves and each other. Neshat is in a stickier spot than Taylor-Wood, having to make a cohesive film out of a feminist story that is both a fairy tale and a history book. Back in 2003, she began filming a series of five conceptual videos in Morocco with her longtime partner, Shoja Azari (who is also her collaborator on Women Without Men). The videos allowed Neshat to explore the novel’s particularities before moving to a feature-length narrative. She cuts the cast of five women down to four, and amps up the storyline about the U.S.- and British-backed coup against Dr. Mossadegh’s democratically elected government. By downplaying the allegorical in favour of the political, Neshat loses some of the femaleness of Parsipur’s novel.

Director Shirin Neshat. (Mongrel Media)

The four women experience the tumultuous summer of 1953 in different ways. News-obsessed 30-year-old Munis escapes forced seclusion at the hands of her brother by committing suicide; she returns to the streets as a ghost. Her friend Faezeh’s dreams of marriage and children are torn apart by rape. Young Zarin’s life in a brothel leads to a hauntingly silent nervous breakdown. And middle-aged Fakhri’s encounter with a former flame prompts her to end her unhappy marriage and buy an orchard on the outskirts of Tehran. As the women travel down the dusty road from the city to the secluded orchard, they enter, as if through a rabbit hole, a garden of Eden — a utopia free of men and the hardships that come with them.

At one point in the film, Fakhri listens to an acquaintance talk about how a country can only speak of justice and democracy once it is culturally developed. Art and politics are inextricably linked in Iran, and in Neshat’s work. The country and its women are hungering for the same thing: freedom.

Just as you can spot Taylor-Wood The Artist in Nowhere Boy’s saturated colours and portraiture, Neshat is at ease with the surrealist demands of Parsipur’s story. Some of the most stunning scenes include Munis’s balletic, bloodless plunge off a building; her seamless disinterment and resurrection; and the blossoming of a barren garden overnight. On the performance front, however, Neshat is less successful — the acting is frequently stilted.

Both Women Without Men and Nowhere Boy are part of an organic progression in the directors’ work since the 1990s. With that comfort comes a certain confidence — a trait missing from the directorial debuts of some of their art-world cohorts. Though clever from a compositional point of view, Cindy Sherman’s campy Office Killer (1997) fell prey to its own Sherman-ness: an over-the-top storyline and stunt casting (Carol Kane and Molly Ringwald?). Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (1995) featured some truly dismal special effects and was rightly considered a critical and commercial failure.

Julian Schnabel, however, turns out to be a better filmmaker than he ever was an artist. Basquiat (1996) was met with mixed reviews, but anyone who would question Schnabel’s dexterity need only look at his third movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), one of the most evocative films of the past decade. The standout rookie is video artist Steve McQueen, whose bold first feature, the award-winning Hunger (2008), showed uncommon discipline and depth. McQueen’s background bolsters and enhances the film, but he doesn’t let form trump the inherently dramatic story about the 1981 Irish hunger strike.

Both Neshat and Taylor-Wood are using filmmaking to expand on their existing oeuvre. More transparently, they’re looking to appeal to a larger audience. As Neshat herself has pointed out, a background in art history is useful when visiting a gallery, but one doesn’t need a degree in film to appreciate a movie.

In a voiceover at the end of Women Without Men, Munis says, “All that we wanted to find was a new form, a new way. Release.” By moving out of the galleries and into the cinemas, Neshat and Taylor-Wood are reaching for the same thing. The results may be uneven, but their attempts are captivating to watch.

Women Without Men opens in Toronto on April 2. Nowhere Boy opens Oct. 15.

Stéphanie Verge is a writer based in Toronto.