As long as there have been cameras and film, there have been people loading the first with the second and turning out three act dramas for our entertainment. But running parallel to that history is another in which film-makers have put their cameras to very different uses. From the German Expressionists onwards, there have been those who have pointed their lenses in other directions, looked for different ways of telling stories -- or who told no stories at all, choosing instead to experiment with light, movement and what happens when both go to work on photographic emulsion.

In the late 1920s, with Charlie Chaplin at the height of his crowd-pleasing fame, Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel tried to capture the dream state in Un Chien Andalou. Even 80 years on, his film looks freshly-minted and pleasingly bonkers. It still shocks, too. In Denmark, around the same time, Carl Dreyer shot the impressionistic silent film Vampyr. And in London in the 1930s, New Zealander Len Lye made entirely abstract colour films for the trail-blazing GPO Film Unit. These are just three film-makers whose natural arena could easily have been the art gallery. Today, it almost certainly would be.

In Scotland, the seminal figure in the world of the art film is Margaret Tait. A qualified doctor, she gave up medicine in the late 1940s for a lifetime of avant garde experimentation, first from a base in Edinburgh’s Rose Street and, later, from her native Orkney. Appropriately, Tait’s work is the starting point for Running Time, a near 50-year survey of Scottish film and video art which opens at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh later this month.

It’s the National Galleries of Scotland’s first major exhibition devoted exclusively to the form and will occupy the Dean’s entire top floor. The five-week show is split into themes which change weekly, and more than 100 films will feature, representing the work of more than 60 artists. Among them are Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon and rising stars of the form such as Henry Coombes, Katy Dove, Beagles and Ramsay, and Dalziel and Scullion (click above to watch examples of these artists’ work contained in the show). There’s room, too, for work by Tait’s fellow 1960s pioneers David Hall and the Boyle Family, the Scottish collective formed round the late Mark Boyle, his wife and their artist children. Moving on a decade, Running Time will also show work by Glasgow-born video artist Elsa Stansfield, one of whose collaborations with Dutch artist Madelon Hooykaas gives the show its title.

“There hasn’t been an exhibition ­dedicated exclusively to Scottish film and video art, and what we wanted to do was highlight the richness of the material and bring it together,” explains Lauren Rigby, one of the two curators behind the project. “We’re trying to reveal something of the legacy of film-making in Scotland and also the diversity of it. We’ve started with artists like Tait and Hall, and taken it up to recent graduate level to try to show how things have developed.”

One of the earliest pieces in the show is by Eduardo Paolozzi, not generally known for working in film but here represented by 1963’s History Of Nothing, a 12-minute animation filled with his trademark Pop Art imagery. Other well-known artists featured include David Shrigley, who shows a handful of his deceptively simple animations, and 2005 Turner Prize nominee Jim Lambie, who shows Ultralow, an early video work which turns the tips of lighted cigarettes into fireflies. Artists more closely associated with film work include Rosalind Nashashibi (showing 2002’s Midwest and 2004’s University Library) and Luke Fowler, whose 45-minute Pilgrimage From Scattered Points appears alongside Tait and Nashashibi in week two.

As well as the works inside the gallery, Glasgow-based Torsten Lauschmann will show a specially commissioned piece in its entrance. The as-yet-untitled work will be projected onto a pitched glass roof from a waterproof structure Lauschmann will build over it. Visitors will look up to see words falling from the sky, growing larger and then appearing to shatter on the panes -- with accompanying sound effects.

Lauschmann is making the work using 3D software. “It’s basically what films like Shrek are made with,” he says. “But it’s amazing because you’re freed of the restrictions of the camera. You can create exactly what you want without limitations. I think it’s going to be quite important for artists working in film to use 3D technology.”

The impression Lauschmann is aiming for is the feeling you might get walking into a Gothic cathedral. “I see film and video art more in the tradition of stained glass, with its idea of luminous light and colour,” he says. “I’m trying to get away from the idea that film is an A to B story. If you strip film down, it’s like intelligent light. It can tell a story but it can do anything else, too, any combination of abstraction and narrative and shadow.”

For Lauschmann, the new exhibition is overdue recognition of a simple fact: that while Scotland may not have a strong visual culture -- our strengths lean more towards the spoken and written word -- it has a long and abiding love of the moving image in all forms. “Think about Glasgow having over 100 cinemas in the early 20th century, filling 10,000 seats a night,” he says. “It’s a cinema-mad city and that must have had some ripple-on effect. Recently, because of the art boom in Glasgow over the last 10 years, there’s been better documented film work. But there is still a lot of overlooked work in Scotland, especially from the 1960s and 1970s.”

Running Time aims to right that wrong.

 Click the video panel above to watch Beagles and Ramsay’s Two Fine Examples of British Dentistry (2009) or see related links for other artists' videos

Running Time: Artist Films In Scotland 1960 To Now opens at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh on Saturday (until November 22).