"A wordless, associative, haunted journey – sometimes rueful and sobering, sometimes very funny." – The Guardian

The French philosopher and film theorist Gilles Deleuze famously divided cinema into two categories: action-image and time-image. Californian filmmaker and CalArts film lecturer Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) turns Deleuze's writing into a template for his latest film essay, The Thoughts That Once We Had.

Using an idiosyncratic array of clips – from Marx Brothers slapstick to Debra Paget's erotic snake dance in Fritz Lang's The Indian Tomb – Andersen builds a complex, free-flowing enquiry into the forms and preoccupations of 20th-century cinema. In some ways a companion piece to Mark Cousins' The Story of Film and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma, The Thoughts That Once We Had is a treat for cinephiles.

"A richly layered journey through cinematic history." – University of Chicago Film Studies Center