Les Amis de Cinématon

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Reel 26 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 11 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

During a shoot with an Eagle K4 camera, a failure caused freeze-ups with abstract shapes.

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.

Reel 24 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 30 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 28 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Madrid, a stroll in the Spanish capital with Joseph Morder followed by the snowstorm that paralyzed the Paris region on December 8, 2010.

Reel 35 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 25 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 37 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 29 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

The action of "Le Jour où la Terre s'éveilla" begins 4 billion 540 million years ago ... at the time of the formation of planet Earth. This formation lasted 20 million years. The film lasts 12 hours and is composed of 1,080,000 images. Each image of the film corresponds to 20 years of the life of the Earth. Every second of the film corresponds to 500 years of the life of the Earth.

Reel 31 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 8 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.