It wasn’t really that long ago when many had to rely on dial-up Internet service, when listening to live-streaming audio sounded like an underwater long-distant phone call, and podcasts and streaming video on demand were merely ideas on the horizon. In the breezy Dreams Rewired, perspectives on the rapid-fire technical developments of a century ago mirror contemporary digital innovations. So back then, the culprit for the “new electric intimacy” is the telephone, and tuning in to radios becomes “a lifestyle choice,” according to the plummy narration by Tilda Swinton.

This easygoing essay-as-documentary offers anecdotal evidence through a barrage of often mesmerizing images from the first half of the last century, mostly from the silent era. As a result, the film really serves as a tribute to the then newfangled phenomenon of moving pictures. However self-evident its overall argument may be, Dreams’ equivalent of extra bandwidth is its compilation of early film history. Covering the emergence of the seventh art, the bulk of the visual treasure trove has been culled from Northern Europe, with a smattering of British and American clips; Italy’s contribution to the vocabulary of filmmaking is conspicuously absent. The most famous excerpt is undoubtedly from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and film buffs will recognize a cameo by Buster Keaton.

Through the barrage of clips, the audience is reminded that though the hot technology of the day changes, human behavior remains the same, but its most persuasive (and unspoken) revelation is that filmmaking evolved concurrently in the Old World as it did in the United States. (However, Europe’s industries took a hit in terms of distribution during World War I before picking up again in the 1920s, most notably in Weimar Germany.) The French production/distribution company Gaumont, founded in 1895, and the Scandinavian-based Nordisk, established in 1906, outrank the Hollywood majors in age, for examples.

The vibe never ventures toward the heavy or disturbing: nothing is made of Nazi Germany’s control of media. Swinton’s narration goes out of its way, however, to highlight the accomplishments of French pioneer Alice Guy, credited with making the first narrative film. No mention is made of the rise of movie stars, whether in Hollywood or elsewhere. Instead of pinpointing the industrialization of filmmaking, Dreams ventures to Communist Russia for the agitprop cinema trains, where filmmakers would shoot and edit and then screen the next day (or “upload,” as the film insists) a movie featuring the agrarian population. Only one landmark of cinema’s first decades is singled out, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, justly saluted as the “blueprint for the propaganda film.” Yep, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The film keeps the tone snappy while glossing over the impact of World War I on technologies and the rise of the middle class, who bought mass-produced gramophones and records. Swinton has her tongue planted firmly in check as she provides the dialogue for silent movie scenarios in her crisp, resonant British voice-over: a shirtless hunk circa 1917 is declared “off the hook.” There’s not enough time to groan before she’s on to the next topic.

See the documentary for a grainy clip of a portable wireless phone, which uses a fire hydrant as a metal conduit (obviously, it didn’t take off); an early television broadcast of the 1936 Olympics; and, for a space oddity, a Russian sci-fi film about space aliens in geometric garb spying on Earth. Indeed, the film might be best summed up with its observation “Every age thinks it’s the modern age.”