The holdings of films are concentrated on experimental and avant-garde work. Acquisitions of films by Canadian artists such as Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Nancy Graves and Charles Gagnon began in the 1960s and continued through the 1970s with works by experimental filmmakers like Barbara Sternberg, David Rimmer and Al Razutis. Holdings from the National Gallery's Education Division of European and American avant-garde films by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Maya Deren and others were transferred to the Media Arts collection. There was a major purchase of film prints in the 1980s with the acquisition of the Flux Films Anthology, films by artists associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, including Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins and Paul Sharrits.

Collecting in the Media Arts area has generally been closely linked to the Media Arts exhibition program. Videotapes, for example, are purchased for the purpose of showing them - normally the National Gallery purchases a video work with the right to reproduce it for an exhibition and to keep the copy for study purposes. Thus the collection is built up around the themes explored in the exhibition program, suggested by such programs as Electronic Landscapes (how video artists treat landscape), Fundamental Freedoms : Video Perspectives on Human Rights (a program of artists' documentaries looking at human rights issues), Video and Orality (a program exploring the use of the spoken word in video) , Rebel Girls (program reflecting feminist perspectives). There have been many programs dedicated to the works of single artists or collectives as well, like Lisa Steele, Sara Diamond, Vera Frenkel, Daniel Dion, Paul Wong, Lorraine Dufour and Robert Morin, known as Co-op Vidéo de Montréal. The National Gallery has made a concerted effort to publish interpretations and information about the works shown and a number of catalogues are in circulation related to Media Arts exhibitions and the collection. The video and film collections are available for consultation and study by appointment but the responsibility for circulating work in these media rests with the artists and/or distributors.

The Media Arts collection has initiated the acquisition of a number of multimedia installations reflecting the interest that this kind of work holds for artists. Some of these are complete environments, like Vera Frenkel's ....from the Transit Bar 1992-4, where travellers' stories are recounted on video monitors in a bar setting, complete with a bartender serving drinks, or Paul Wong's Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain 1992-3, where a funerary environment suggests the history of Chinese migration to Canada through the experience of the artist's grandfather, restoring to this history the respect granted in Chinese culture to the dead. Rodney Graham's Coruscating Cinnamon Granules 1996 is a tiny cinema in an enclosed space the size of the artist's kitchen showing a film that manages to suggest both intimacy and the cosmos. The collection holds several computer-based works that invite the viewer to direct his or her viewing, for example, Luc Courchesne's Portrait One 1990 invites us to converse with a character, with often unpredictable results.