Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979) presents a movie in a regular cinema environment, but without any moving images. A Movie accentuates the experience of watching a movie and foregrounds the performative aspects of the practice of an artist who is perhaps best known for her photographs of ‘arranged’ artworks and objects. This publication is the result of an extensive research project into A Movie and its 2012 iteration, undertaken by researcher Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme during Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication.

The publication includes a research essay by Lütticken that places A Movie in the context of cultural developments in the 1970s and contemporaneous works by the Pictures Generation, a sequence of images from Lawler’s archive selected by Lütticken and contributions by art historians Debbie Broekers, Eve Dullaart, and Daniël van der Poel.