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.

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.

Le Nouvel Hiver is a slightly disillusioned reflection on the state of the world (the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the USSR, the Gulf War), the events of which are the thread of this year's Notebooks (1 January 1991 to 31 December 1991). Of course, these Notebooks are far from this sinister current events because life is elsewhere, in creation and in a quest for the absolute. And then, Le Nouvel Hiver takes us into surprising encounters (with Ken Loach, Brigitte Lahaie) and transports us to places I can't live without (the Ardèche in the North).

Couple is a cinematic series of portrait films, which show two persons, who free to do what they wish, in a fixed camera shot of 3:20 minutes.

"L'Artifice et le factice" is the episode that covers the period from January 1, 1988 to December 31, 1988 of my filmed Notebooks.

Lire is a cinematographic series of filmed portraits that shows, in a single large fixed and sound sequence shot of 3 minutes 20 seconds, a writer reading the beginning of his last published book.

Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.

Pluvia is a film made up of a single fixed sequence shot, half an hour long, which shows a storm and rain in the village of Priay, in the Ain department.

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

A travelling journal of 100 movements from 1978 to 1992.

Rue de Rennes in Paris, February 11, 1984. A ceaseless ballet of motor vehicles and passersby create a hypnotic choreography.

In the fall of 2023, I bought a used Sony video camera from the United States with the MiniDV cassette system online. It was an old model released in February 2007! Inside the camera was a cassette with 23 minutes of recorded footage from a vacation in Mexico. It's impossible to know when these images were filmed. In 2007? In 2023? Definitely between these two dates... Vacation by Proxy is these 23 minutes of film that I then reworked by transforming the image and the sound.

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

Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid died on August 5, 2006, and German filmmaker Werner Schroeter on April 12, 2010. They were close friends, and along with Jean Eustache, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philippe Garrel were the most innovative filmmakers of the post-New Wave era.

Les Deux Lyon is, in a subjective camera and in a single sequence of just over an hour, a wandering through the city of Lyon that begins from the hill of Fourvière and its basilica to end on the other hill in Lyon, that of Croix-Rousse. Between these two peaks, the film sinks into Old Lyon by taking the chemin des Rosaires, the ascent (in the direction of the descent) of the Chazeaux, crosses the Place Saint-Jean bordered by the cathedral of the same name (in the process of renovation), then runs along the Palace of Justice (hidden in part by a palisade due to work), The journey continues through the rue d'Algérie, the famous Place des Terreaux with its town hall and museum of fine arts, rue Puits Gaillot, the slopes of the Croix-Rousse with its multitude of steps and stairs that lead us to the Plateau. The film ends on the esplanade of Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse and the Gros Caillou of glacial origin that is climbed by children.

Reel 6 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.