Clint Eastwood, who gave his collection of cinema material to the archive, said: "It could not be in better hands than those of Jeanine Basinger.
Rankin and a screenwriter friend had first conceived of the thrill-seeking amateur crooks and their raid as cinema material, "my Ocean's Eleven", with Sean Connery as the arrogant academic, Ewan McGregor as the gormless millionaire – and so, starrily, on.
With the Shaun TV show enjoying a vast global reach – Aardman say it has been sold to more than 170 territories worldwide – it would appear to be prime cinema material with transnational appeal: no dialogue, slapstick humour, inoffensive, family-oriented storylines.
Of course, when you're working with cinema as a material, you're also working with all of the cultural associations we have with films, which is so much more than just colors, texture and sound.
Given how many directors in the festival shoot in digital these days, the programmers should consider changing its name to New Directors/New Movies to acknowledge that film, as the material of cinema-making choice, is becoming increasingly rare, especially in cash-strapped independent productions.
So the filmmaker Satyajit Ray (whose work Naipaul greatly admires) could say in 1948, before he had made a single film: "The raw material of the cinema is life itself.
Instead of taking risks on untried material, cinemas will soon be ushering in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a new Captain America movie (Civil War) which by all accounts will be an Avengers film in all but name, and new JK Rowling-penned Harry Potter universe film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Granted, only over-21s will be able to watch it in cinemas and promotional material will carry a consumer advisory saying "mature theme, sexual scenes", but some are already hailing the move as a sign of loosening censorship in the notoriously tightly controlled city state.
All of which would have been quite challenging to stage at the Globe in 1599, but are ideal material for cinema.
Part of the pleasure of the first sections is their relative straightforwardness, particularly "1-6," which, through artfully edited visual splendors — a talking skeleton, a walking cat, a spinning record — creates a graceful meditation on cinema as motion, as material, as perfection.
The title comes from a Robyn Hitchcock song and hints at the work's source material: French cinema, particularly the script of Agnès Varda's classic New Wave film "Cléo From 5 to 7". "Often we start with a mistake," Mr. Lazar said, referring to their incorrect assumption that the commission mandated a French subject.
