I recently saw a remarkable short film. It stars Cary Grant, Sean Connery, Humphrey Bogart, Buster Keaton, Audrey Hepburn, Eva Marie Saint, and Ingrid Bergman.

The film is “Fast Film,” directed by Virgil Widrich, and it’s stunning. I’ve wanted to see it ever since I heard about the process by which it was made–Widrich and his team took 65,000 printouts of scenes from classic films and animated them together into a new film. The result has been traveling the film festival circuit for about a year now, and I’ve been dying to see it. I finally found an online link for it, courtesy of Britain’s Channel 4. Having seen it in a tiny window on my monitor, I’m now even hungrier to see it on a big screen. The amount of detail in every frame is overwhelming, and I’m sure I’m missing most of it. Two samples:


If those pictures whet your apetite, you can watch the film here.
You can then learn more about how the film was made here, or from the films official website.
One question that I haven’t seen answered: how did they get away with this from a legal point of view? Did they somehow get permission to excerpt every one of the 400 films they used? Does this fall under fair use? Or are they just gambling that nobody is going to dare sue them for making such a brilliant film?
NOTE (added March 17): The films are streamed via RealPlayer, which I know some people find odious. If you’d like an ad- and spyware-free version of RealPlayer, you can get one courtesy of the publically-funded BBC.