`They're better talked about than seen," replied Andy Warhol when asked about his films shortly before his death in 1987; but that typically disingenuous statement is disproved by the fascinating, if incomplete (no Chelsea Girls?) retrospective currently running at the Irish Film Centre in conjunction with the Warhol exhibition, After The Party, at IMMA. Many of the "middle period" films which dominate the programme exert a fascination rendered even more powerful by the passage of time - postcards from the now-mythical speed-freaks, hustlers and transvestites who populated Warhol's Factory in its mid-1960s heyday. They combine the voyeuristic fascination of verite documentary with a highly sophisticated interrogation of what it means to point a camera at something.

In the accompanying programme notes to the film season, Declan McGonagle, Director of IMMA, suggests that: "Since we are so thoroughly wrapped in media culture today, we are actually in a better position to read and understand the resonance in Warhol's work than when it was originally produced. We live in a media world and it makes Warhol legible in a new way".

Call them experimental, avant-garde or non-narrative, but certain kinds of film-making practice have always existed outside the mainstream of commercially-driven production. The boundaries between the "experimental", the "arthouse" and the "mainstream" are subjective and fluid, but experimental work often explores the implications of the cinematic gaze and deconstructs the "classical" grammar of film-making - scripting, lighting, framing, editing and sound. Received notions about production values and broadcast-quality standards are what make the film-making process so expensive, and experimental work often uses cheap technology like Super 8 or video as a means of giving access to marginalised groups or views.

Rod Stoneman is chief executive of the Irish Film Board, but prior to that spent several years at Channel 4 as a commissioning editor for Independent Film and Video, at a time when the channel had a robust commitment to supporting experimental work. "It's crucial to have a lively dimension of visually-based experimental work in cinema," he believes. "The terms avant-garde or experimental are often used pejoratively, but the real meaning of the avant-garde is not necessarily that it's ahead of its time or leading the way. It's of something whose effect is oblique or adjacent to the mainstream of the culture."

The space within which experimental film-making takes place seems to have shrunk in the last 10 years, due to broader cultural, economic and technological shifts. The growth of a more self-consciously audience-friendly independent production sector, working in genres such as the thriller and the romantic comedy, has been paralleled by an increase in the use of audio-visual technology in art installations.

Much of the most notable work exhibited in Irish galleries in the last year has utilised the moving image, while in Britain the last two winners of the Turner Prize have been for works in video. It may be that the experimental moving image has left the cinema auditorium behind for good.

"In the broadest terms, you might argue that certain kinds of low-budget production have migrated to the gallery," says Mick Wilson, a lecturer and artist who uses video in his work. "But they have undergone a significant transformation along the way. People who are attracted to the film-making process are attracted to the idea of communicating with a mass audience. "But contemporary artists don't see audio-visual work necessarily as a means of reaching more people. There's a very different agenda at work, which is founded on certain conventions of art practice. Warhol's work comes from art cinema, from Hollywood, from documentary and from pornography. Warhol is not unimportant, but what's most important about his work is the foregrounding of the outsider."

"The gallery world seems to me to be tiny and over-theoretical," says Stoneman. "I believe that it's much more productive and interesting to extend these boundaries in the context of cinema. That's where there's a potential audience, after all."

Many techniques and styles once considered marginal now form part of the basic vocabulary of the moving image. "People may find it objectionable, but popular culture has always appropriated ideas from the marginal and the avant-garde," says Wilson. "It's naive to expect that's not going to happen - I suppose what upsets people is that it explodes the myth that by making formally subversive work you can change the basis of society. There's a mistaken belief that changes in representational practice can effect social change. The avant-garde now is the official culture, where the cult of the new reigns supreme."

Stoneman doesn't agree that consumerism has won the day, however. "Some say that there is no avant-garde now because many of those aesthetic strategies have been colonised by music promos, title sequences and commercials, but there's a world of difference between the fatuous superficiality of MTV and the lasting value of serious work. I think it's alive and well, and I even get the sense that there are newer, younger audiences for that kind of work now." Stoneman cites the reflexive multiple narratives and visual trickery of a film such as Pulp Fiction as an example of the way that contemporary feature films continue to appropriate experimental techniques. "Contemporary culture is quite open to the scratching, stretching and manipulation of the moving image." In an Irish context, he picks the work of Joe Comerford as an example of how text and narrative can be subverted and examined within the context of the feature film.

The Film Board's brief largely excludes non-commercial cinema, but Stoneman points to Board-supported films like Frankie McCafferty's Brood and Alan Gilsenan's All Souls Day as examples of experimental work. Both films were also supported by the Arts Council, which has just completed a redefinition of its remit in the area, according to its Film Officer, Mary Hyland. "We specify that applications for our Film and Video Awards must engage with the art form of film, but it would be fair to say that the majority of the submissions we receive are for formally conservative, short dramas." The council defines its role in film as "supporting the film-maker as artist"; a romantic, individualistic position which Warhol himself would have despised. "There is ample evidence that the idea of the autonomous art object and the autonomous viewer is no longer tenable. In Warhol's work it is made to disappear altogether," writes Declan McGonagle. "The implications of this are visible in his paintings and prints but especially in his films, where ensemble production, rather than theory, undermined ideas of authorship . . . "

Experimental film-making practice has often defined itself through its ambiguous relationship with commercial cinema and television. Its recurring concerns with questions of context and authorship have inevitably shifted with the times - the notion of choosing to sit in a darkened auditorium to watch a projected image has been irrevocably changed by the advent of the VCR and the multiplex. As the world goes on-line, new spaces beyond the gallery, the cinema and the television set are becoming available for the dissemination of the moving image. Niall Sweeney, director of the multimedia centre, ArtHouse, admits that it "hasn't quite happened yet. He worries about "the whole thing turning into a giant academic exercise with a lot of posturing and not a lot happening. But it has always taken time for new media to settle into forms of their own."

The Andy Warhol film season continues at the IFC each Wednesday evening until February 28th. For further information, phone (01) 679 5744