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.

Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).

30 years after their artistic revolution, members of the Zanzibar group meet in 1999 in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris (France) in front of Gérard Courant's camera.

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.

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

Reel 20 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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.

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

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).

Trio is a cinematic series of filmed portraits that shows, in a single large, fixed and silent shot of 3 minutes and 20 seconds, three people free to do what they want.

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

Reel 23 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

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 22 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.