How to see the first movies

Strange continuity: why our brains don’t explode at film cuts

Can I remember it differently?

A propulsive ode to ‘the forgotten parents of film’

Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.

Impromptu is at once a transfixing audiovisual experience and a whirlwind visual history. In the short, the Spanish director María Lorenzo draws on a wide variety of animated styles and archival footage to build a tribute to ‘the forgotten parents of film’. This includes swift references to pre-cinema devices such as zoetropes and thaumatropes, film pioneers such as the Lumière brothers and Eadweard Muybridge, and visual cultures from around the world. The result feels deeply researched and yet – as the title hints at – somewhat informal, prioritising the kinetic power of moving images over a more formal exploration of their history.

Director: María Lorenzo

Producer: Enrique Millán

videoFilm and visual culture

A Palme d’Or-winning animation toys with the way our eyes perceive light

videoFilm and visual culture

Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong

Time dilates and people flow in and out of each other in a hallucinatory urban commute

Dizzying discs and obscene wordplay – revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 film debut

videoInformation and communication

An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication

videoCognition and intelligence

For millennia, we’d never seen anything like film cuts. How do we process them so easily?

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videoTechnology and the self

A haunting scene from ‘Minority Report’ inspires a voyage into time and memory

‘Moving paintings’ evoke a quantum particle collision at the Large Hadron Collider

videoBiography and memoir

Do we need our memories when we can document virtually every aspect of our lives?

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