A propulsive ode to ‘the forgotten parents of film’
Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that may be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
Impromptu is both a dazzling audiovisual rush and a compact, unruly history of moving images. In this short film, the Spanish director María Lorenzo combines archival footage, shifting animation styles and rapid visual quotation to honour what she calls “the forgotten parents of film” — the devices, artists and image-makers who helped prepare the way for cinema.
The film moves at exhilarating speed through pre-cinematic inventions such as zoetropes and thaumatropes, early pioneers including the Lumière brothers and Eadweard Muybridge, and visual traditions from across the world. Deeply researched but deliberately loose in form, Impromptu is less a conventional lesson than a celebration of motion itself: a kinetic tribute to the many experiments, spectacles and visual cultures that made film imaginable before cinema had fully arrived.
Director: María Lorenzo
Producer: Enrique Millán
