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.

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.

I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.

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.

Reel 14 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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

Courant registered Garrel’s dialogues in order to produce his first urgent film, the first of his essays inquiring the state of current cinema. As a synthesis for the 20th century, Garrel invoked his relationship with Freud, Henri Langlois, Orson Welles, Marx, The Rolling Stones, Godard, Warhol, Picasso and Bergman and draw a territory in that different kind of cinema also inhabited by Courant’s art. Four years later –as a sequel, and a first example of Courant’s series– there was another meeting with Garrel, where again the filmmaker adds names related to his sensitivity, such as Murnau, Von Stroheim, the Lumière brothers, Abel Gance, Polanski, Rivette; the writers André Breton and Gabriele d’Annunzio; and the actresses Anna Karina, Nico, Zouzou and Maria Schneider –three stars of his films. (Diego Trerotola)

On 6 December 2013, a public exhibition dedicated to her memory, Bernadette Lafont l'exposition hommage, was held in Paris. Actors Stéphane Audran, Guillaume Gouix and Alexandra Stewart read some extracts of Bernard Bastide's new biography Bernadette Lafont, une vie de cinéma, including some original letters written by Bernadette. The event was filmed by Gérard Courant and aired as an episode of Carnets filmés, In Memoriam Bernadette Lafont.

Reel 33 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

"Les Malheurs d'Yvan Noé" shows the ravages of time on the film A Death Without Importance that Yvan Noé shot in 1948. By isolating and slowing down the most damaged parts of the French filmmaker's film, I managed to create a object with abstract shapes and, insidiously, to give another life to an artistic work. - Gérard Courant

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)