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.

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.

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.

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.

The films of Marilyn Monroe, sped up by Gerard Courant.

Reel 24 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.

Amours décolorées is a cinematographic poem to the glory of Mariola San Martin, model, stylist, dancer and Spanish photographer.

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

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.

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).