Impromptu
2017 · 11m · Spain
Directed by María Lorenzo Hernández
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A kaleidoscopic animated tribute to the forgotten parents of cinema — from zoetropes and thaumatropes to Lumière and Muybridge — built from varied animation styles and archival footage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A kaleidoscopic essay film about forgotten cinema pioneers sounds like it should be self-important film-school navel-gazing, but Hernández actually commits to formal chaos—mixing animation styles and archival material so liberally that it stops pretending to be a 'proper' documentary and becomes something genuinely unhinged in the best way.
Impromptu situates itself deliberately within the lineage of experimental essay cinema and archival assemblage, where the multiplicity of animation techniques becomes a formal argument about cinema's own genealogy—each style choice is a citation, a conversation with the very history it's documenting.
The decision to refuse a unified visual language—to let each animation technique stand distinct rather than harmonize them—is what elevates this from a clever montage into something that actually *feels* like the accumulated strata of cinema itself, rather than just talking about it.