The silver scene.

Though the movies celebrated their 100th birthday last year, this spring found London awash with a wave of celluloid festivities to mark the centenary of the motion picture's arrival in Britain. First off was the Hayward Gallery's "Spellbound," which managed to open 100 years to the day (21 February 1896) the Lumiere Brothers brought their newly invented cinematograph to a London audience. Taking its title from Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 thriller, which featured a two-minute dream sequence by Salvador Dali, "Spellbound" presented new works from ten British-based artists and film directors, including Peter Greenaway, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, Eduardo Paolozzi, and, inevitably, Damien Hirst, celebrating "the extraordinary love affair between the two great visual art forms of the twentieth century." (Given that the show contained everything from paintings to projections, plaster rats, and pieces of living flesh, exactly which two visual art forms the organizers had in mind remained something of a mystery.)

The effort to blur the boundaries between art and film was viewed by local government officials, however, in a less than harmonious light. In a decision that threatens to affect the viewing of film-based artworks throughout the UK - as well as provide an unexpected insight into the anomalies governing the moving image in this country - the London Borough of Lambeth put paid to any cultural crossdressing by insisting that all large-screen moving images on show at the Hayward Gallery were subject to film categories imposed by the British Board of Film Classification. This meant that a series of ungainly barriers had to be erected in order to shield juvenile eyes from the huge suspended screen showing Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho - because, whatever its projection speed, this Hitchcock classic still carries an "X" certificate. However, since Psycho carries a "15" certificate on video with different categories for film and video being yet another eccentricity of the British rating system - young Gordon wanna-bes can always do a bit of freeze-framing in the comfort of their own homes.

Another notable casualty was Hirst's debut feature Hanging Around. This 28-minute romp through the now-familiar Hirst territory of love, death, friends, and cigarette butts may have included in its disclaimer that "no butterflies were killed or injured in this film," but by showing a needle entering an arm it still committed at least one possible transgression in the eyes of the British censor, which may, ultimately, have accounted for the "18" certificate slapped onto it. To young Hirst fans eager to lap up a brand-new Britpop soundtrack of unreleased material by Pulp and Blur, and to see cult-comic Eddie Izzard as a psychiatrist in a direct tribute to Hitchcock's Spellbound, it was scant comfort that they were permitted to scrutinize the living genitals on the five actors who were part of Greenaway's room full of sound effects and fury; or that they could view ad infinitum the snapping alien ("18" certificate on film and video) springing gorily from John Hurt's stomach, part of Scott's four-monitor mishmash of movie clips and production notes. Still, such are the discrepancies of British censorship that Hirst's youthful following will not have to wait long: the BBC has just bought Hanging Around and plans to put it on the nation's TV sets within the year.

Because of a legal loophole relating to its status as a cinema club, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts was able to avoid the long arm of the censor; and "Pandaemonium," its multimedia festival of the moving image, lived up to its name by refusing even to be restricted by the fabric of the ICA building. Simon Biggs' The Castle - Parsing the Book, 1995, presented a spectacular digital projection of figures, numbers, and architecture which, for three nights, lit up an external wall of the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank; meanwhile there was pandemonium aplenty in cyberspace with access to such artistic CD-ROMS as Cyberflesh/Girl/Monster, 1994, by Australian Linda Derment, which took the viewer through a dislocated fleshy environment of fragmented text and body parts.

Though the ICA will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year, it still shows some of the edgiest work in the UK. The five installations housed within its walls, all selected for "Pandaemonium" from a nationwide competition, included the following: Keith Tyson's chilling Angel Maker Part II - The Quadruped, 1996, which presented a cluster of environments that used a multiplicity of media to stage an escalating series of catastrophes, ranging from autoasphyxiation to the sinking of the Titanic; Gillian Wearing's quasi-documentary video triptych charting the bizarre activities and eventual interaction of three English eccentrics; and Mark Wallinger's high-speed, mechanical-hare's rear view of a greyhound dog race that careered across six monitors.

Georgina Starr, by contrast, rarely restricts herself to a single viewpoint. In the Tale Gallery's "Art Now" special projects room, film and fantasy, magic and madness were all combined in her epic installation "Hypnodreamdruff," where props, TV monitors, and video projections enabled you to sit down at the dinky detritus-strewn tables of The Hungry Brain nightclub and observe its clientele; to squat in the bedroom of a young woman obsessed with the musical Grease; to eavesdrop in the eat-in-kitchen of three ill-suited flatmates; and (most disturbingly) to enter the claustrophobic trailer home and the intimate life of its occupant, Dave. All of which was a refreshingly manic respite from the Cezanne-dazed crowds that colonized the rest of the Tale gallery throughout the spring.

Another of the most effective manifestations of the moving image to emerge from London's cinema anniversary assumed a markedly slower pace. In the tradition of the Lumiere Brothers, Brian Catling's Cyclops, 1996, acknowledged that, beyond technics and techniques, the most crucial and magical commodity of cinema is light. An invisible, whispering presence by day, Catling's eerie eight-hour projection at the South London Gallery came into its own at dusk, when, like a vintage sepia photograph, it seemed to suck in the last glimmer of light to reveal the artist, a.k.a. Cyclops - a grotesque and poignant presence that had been there all the time.

Louisa Buck is an arts journalist and broadcaster who works for BBC Radio 4, The Independent, and UK GQ.