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Luis Buñuel wrote that dreams were the first cinema. His short film Un Chien Andalou, co-written with Salvador Dalí and inspired by the pair’s dreams, is nearly 100 years old but its images still have the power to shock and disturb: a razor slicing through an eyeball; two rotting donkeys strapped to grand pianos.

Un Chien Andalou is one of dozens of films in this documentary about the influence of dreams in early cinema. It is directed by Gerald Fox, based on an essay by the late Harvard film studies professor Vlada Petrić that expounds a theory that early cinema pioneers used techniques to activate the brain much like dreams. In the nicest possible way, the documentary itself feels like a film-school lecture, erudite and exhaustive. Its expert edit of clips conveys the shock of the new that audiences must have felt in the 1910s and 1920s, watching the double exposure used to create the ghost-like vision of a victim in the tormented mind of his murderer in DW Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience. Or Charlie Chaplin turning into a chicken in the eyes of a man delirious with hunger in The Gold Rush.

Kinaesthesia is essentially a greatest hits of experimental early cinema from German expressionists FW Murnau and Fritz Lang to the Soviets Sergei Eisenstein and Oleksandr Dovzhenko. I hadn’t heard of Japanese film-maker Teinosuke Kinugasa or his fascinating looking 1926 film A Page of Madness, set in a psychiatric hospital; it was long believed lost and found years later in a sake barrel. Possibly in recognition of the male-heavy work of early cinema, there is a section devoted to the brilliance of the avant garde film-maker Maya Deren. The narration by Fox, is a touch hammy, and dramatic sections featuring the Serbian actor Goran Kostic as professor Petrić add very little. Still, required viewing for anyone interested in the history of cinema.

• Kinaesthesia is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 April.