The Thoughts That Once We Had

Former Ohio State professor Thom Andersen has become one of the greatest cinematic essayists of our time with films such as Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Red Hollywood (1996). He describes his latest movie as “a personal history of cinema, partially inspired by Gilles Deleuze.” Made of up a digressive and beguiling montage of clips from cinema history (from Griffith to Godard) accompanied by Andersen’s succinct intertitles, the film is a journey “not just through the history of cinematic innovation, but through the 20th century history itself.” Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975) was inducted by the Library of Congress into the National Film Registry in 2015. (108 mins., DCP)