Stone Age Cinema

Did you think the first movies were screened in a cinema? According to groundbreaking discoveries, our prehistoric ancestors may have invented the concept while drawing on their walls. Over the past 150 years, we have discovered many examples of amazing prehistoric art, most of which are fascinating representations of animals.

Today, a new reading of these paintings and engravings has revealed the existence of numerous cases of the breakdown of movement. A horse painting from the Lascaux caves in France, for example, is made up of many versions of the animal representing different positions of movement. Director and archeologist Marc Azema extracts these individual images and displays them in succession, demonstrating how they play back like a cartoon.

This documentary takes us right back to the beginnings of Homo sapiens’ artistic heritage to discover these graphic narratives, in a unique investigation into the cultural DNA of humanity.