Film and performance have always been closely interconnected, from the origins of cinematic projection in 1895. This essay, with a theoretical focus, explores how film and moving-image forms work to transform performance when they intersect with it, and vice versa. It examines how film serves to mediate and ‘reframe’ the experience and the time of live performance events, notably through the incorporation of moving-image elements into the space of performance, and through particular forms of projection and audience perception. It also probes how conceptions of intermediality can be traced specifically through the intersection of film and performance. The essay spans the entirety of moving image culture, beginning with an account of the connections between film and performance in the work of the German innovators of moving-image projection, the Skladanowsky Brothers, and ending with an examination of the work of the contemporary Lebanese filmmaker and performance artist, Rabih Mroué, whose work resonates with early cinema’s performative strategies but focuses also on current digital media events such as the dangerous ‘performative’ public filming with iPhones of government snipers in the streets of Syria.