"It's not until Rembrandt that you get an artist trying to depict a frozen moment in time"

I am sitting in the slightly scuzzy cinema that is the Prince Charles in Leicester Square watching a short film of a young woman. She is singing along to a pop record. She's got her hair pulled back by a slide, and braces on her teeth. She must be about 14. The camera never moves from her face. She looks as if she's about to start crying. It's a bit like the iconic Sinead O'Connor video for "Nothing Compares 2 U", but the still, close camera also makes me think of a coiffed and jewelled lady in a portrait by Rogier van der Weyden - although, as someone said later, this portrait of adolescent angst is played out for the duration of a pop song, whereas a van der Weyden portrait takes account of someone's whole life.

Four minutes later, we watch a two-minute piece of a seated Sam Taylor-Wood, holding the prone body of the maverick Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr, in the style of Michelangelo's Pieta. And then a short film by Sara Rossi in which three armed people in white anoraks and frightening, beaked masks kneel in a snowy terrain, repeatedly "firing" at another group of people in anoraks and masks. There is a third group standing beside them, presumably waiting to be shot. To symbolise their wounds, the victims pull long red scarves out of their jackets and fall down, their arms piteously windmilling.

They get up. They are shot down. The red scarves fly out again on to the snow. The long rifles and hunting stance of the firing squad are deliberate references to Goya's Executions of the Third of May, the repetitions an attempt perhaps to work against the temporal nature of film, and give the moving picture something of Goya's monumentality. To pick apart "Old and New Dreams", a programme of film and video art related to Old Masters, we needed a curator from the National Gallery. Happily, one was on hand in the form of Alexander Sturgis, who was quizzed afterwards by Catherine Wood, curator at Tate Modern. Wood's opener was that the main difference between film and painting is that one is time-based, and the other static.

But no: Sturgis posited the fascinating idea that before photography was invented (he mentioned 1835 as a cut-off date), painters had no notion of the existence of a single moment in time, and although paintings themselves obviously have a certain singularity, they do not necessarily offer a single idea. "Paintings do not give a snapshot," he said. "Time is much more complex in a painting. There is often a simultaneousness of narrative going on, just as you might find in a film.

"Renaissance crucifixions often depict several things happening at once, although in real life the events would have happened sequentially. Equally, da Vinci's Last Supper is not necessarily about a single moment. It is not until something like, say, Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast, with its spilled water and wine, that you get an artist trying to depict a frozen moment."

Paintings are closer to film than you might think, argued the artist Mike Lewis. He mentioned Manet's great work at the Courtauld Institute, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, in which the barmaid is seen simultaneously from front and back. "It's like two frames from a movie," he pointed out.

By this stage photography, which, broadly speaking, insists on a singular viewpoint, suddenly seemed like the poor relation of painting that it is always campaigning not to be.

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