What are the chances of two concurrent shows of emerging artists both being based directly on classic French movies? About the same, you could say, as the rival magazines Art Forum and Art in America running the same artist on their cover, which is the case this month.

Karen Yasinksy is an animator whose practice grew out of drawing. Eschewing new technologies that enable swiftly produced, fluent computer animation, she retains her distinctive line and touch through arduous, labor intensive processes such as drawing animation and stop-motion animation. The artist Laurie Simmons, writing in a brochure that accompanied Ms. Yasinsky’s 2002 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, described Ms. Yasinsky’s awkward and anatomically wayward figures: Their “arms and legs twitch restlessly, and then suddenly stand up and twirl like jewelry-box ballerinas.” She has an exquisite touch that offers a kind of girly aesthetic — cramped and cloying in equal measure — with edge. Ms. Yasinsky shares with Ms. Simmons a feminist-informed admiration for the Surrealist puppeteer Hans Bellmer.

Her first exhibition at Mireille Mosler, “L’Atalante,” offers reworkings in drawing, collage, and animation of Jean Vigo’s 1934 movie of the same title. “La Nuit” (2007), a six-minute stop-motion video installation, uses puppets to depict an alienated, loveless first night of newlyweds on board the barge that gives the movie its name. As if taking their cues from the titles, “Le Matin” (2007), an animation made from 2,000 individually drawn frames, and screened on a vintage television set, is as light, whimsical, and optimistic as its pendant is dark and uncomfortable. This four-and-a-half-minute video is based on the opening sequence of Vigo’s movie in which the happy couple leaves the village church and walks through fields to their barge. The drawing has a fey simplicity that recalls Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations for his “Le Petit Prince” (1943). Ms. Yasinsky interpolates whimsical, unscripted flourishes: An individual within the crowd of onlookers stands apart from his fellows, and transforms momentarily into a donkey. Or bursts of psychedelic color emanate from Juliette, the heroine, as she encounters the barge that is to be her new home.

Alex McQuilkin, showing in the project room at Marvelli Gallery, bases her piece on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc” (1928). The installation uses two-channel projection, allowing for images of Maria Falconetti burning at the stake, of crows flying ominously overhead, of the martyr’s head being shaved juxtaposed with color frames of the artist herself cutting her long hair and shaving her head. While Dreyer’s silent movie is accompanied by liturgical music, Ms. McQuilkin adds verbal commentary that borders on banality.

While the production values of this work move Ms. McQuilkin’s video up a notch, it is of a piece with her earlier works, which include shorts of herself applying makeup impassively as someone else engages her in sexual intercourse; of her and a girlfriend enacting the death scene of “Romeo and Juliet” to the soundtrack of Wagner’s “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde,” and of her holding her breath under water nearly to the point of drowning. Wrist-cutting is also a persistent theme in her work.

Where Ms. Yasinsky (born 1965) accesses girlhood through dolls and dinky illustration technique, Ms. McQuilkin, who was born in 1980, seems dedicated to a perpetual state of teenage angst in her self-presentation and thematic explorations. The specific identification of both with early cinema relates to a broader trend in feminist-influenced art, from the work of Cindy Sherman through recent exhibitions in New York of Georgina Starr reenacting Theda Bara silent movies, and Dawn Clements, reviewed today in these pages.

Yasinsky until November 17 (35 E. 67th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-249-4195);

McQuilkin until November 24 (526 W. 26th St., second floor, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212–627-3363).