In spite of the appeal of television and internet devices, the British public remains passionately attached to the idea of going to the cinema. Now, with the aid of charitable funding, they will also be able to see more artists’ films, or “film installations”, as the purists would have it, in their local museums. Last week, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne were named as the first beneficiaries of the Moving Image Fund, which is giving regional museums £400,000 over a two-year period to buy contemporary artists’ films.

The fund was conceived by London’s Thomas Dane Gallery – which represents Steve McQueen, the artist filmmaker and director of the Oscar-winning feature 12 Years a Slave – together with the Art Fund charity. Gallery partner Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon says they felt it was “a duty to assist institutions outside London to acquire artists’ films”. Although an increasing number of artists work with film and moving images, they are not matched by a similar increase in the number of private collectors or institutions acquiring their work. “There is a fear of collecting complicated media artworks, which is to do with their installation and conservation,” she says.

The sentiment is echoed by Tate’s curator of film, Andrea Lissoni. While Tate’s collection is exceptional in the UK, with several hundred works dating back to early video in the Seventies, artists’ films are challenging to maintain, he says. “They are also distinct from feature films and documentaries, which we don’t collect.”

To be shared between the Towner and the Whitworth is British artist Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, a multi-screen, immersive installation by the artist, whose film work formed the centrepiece of last year’s Venice Biennale. The film is basically a meditation on human migration, starting with the story of the Chinese illegal immigrants who drowned while cockle-picking off the north-west coast of England, then morphing into a fantasy around the Chinese goddess of fishermen, Mazu. Other editions of the film were already in institutional collections in New York, Paris and Hong Kong, but not the UK, and the price of £80,000 was a favourable one considering that single-image, large-scale prints from the film have sold for up to £47,000 at auction. Nevertheless, it would have been out of reach without the Moving Image Fund.

The other fund acquisition is Israeli-born Omer Fast’s part-documentary, part-fictional 5,000 Feet Is the Best – an exploration of a drone operator’s remote experience of destruction. Editions of the film are already in the collections of the Pompidou Centre, the National Gallery of Canada and the Israel Museum, and it is currently being premiered in New York at the James Cohan gallery and included in a major survey exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Priced at £87,000, it is to be shared by the Towner and the Imperial War Museum, which received funding from a separate source.

Last week it was also announced that theScottish National Gallery of Modern Art had acquired Feed Me, a film by young Scottish artist Rachel Maclean. The cost would have been much more manageable and it was covered by the gallery’s own funds; but it is a typical example of an artist’s film installation where the artist has prescribed very specific conditions in which it should be seen. A relentlessly pastel-coloured satire on consumer culture mixing fairy tale and horror movie influences, its installation with its coloured walls, carpet and bean-bags in shades of baby blue and pink is integral to the work, says the gallery’s curator, Julie-Ann Delaney.

Such requirements, like the spatial demands of Julien’s multi-screen installation, are one reason why artists’ film installations attract relatively few private collectors (so becoming more reliant on museum acquisitions). Another is the advanced technological needs of conservation. A third is that there is not a very developed resale market, should a collector need to recoup their outlay. Very few are seen at auction, apart from the odd example by established names, such as Bruce Nauman or Bill Viola.

There are signs that is changing though, says d’Anglejan-Chatillon. A 2008 film by Irish artist, John Gerrard, Oil Stick Work, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2009, sold last year at Phillips in New York for 10 times its estimate at £76,300 – way over its original retail price. All the more reason for museums to be buying now.