Summary The history of images in the cinema and photograph is recorded on a common material base coordinated by the photographic creation tools. Even if they share equivalent substrates, their artistic processes could not be more dissimilar. In this article, we will highlight a number of artisans initiatives that narrow the distance between different methods and make us think about the materiality of cinema. To that end, we will go through the period when the artist Raoul Ubac subverts the figurative character of the photograph and, with the support of Georges Bataille, Rosalind Krauss and Agostinho de Hipona, we will devote ourselves to reflecting on how to tell it both in Ubac’s photographic works and in three films manufactured at the L’Etna and L’Abominable workshops in France.