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.
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.
Portrait de groupe is a film series of filmed portraits that shows all kinds of groups gathered under family pretexts, friendly or professional, in a single fixed, wide shot (style: family photo) and silent of 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
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)
Almost all of this episode of the Carnets filmés, with the evocative title, Tout est Brisé is devoted to the misdeeds of the storm of 26 December 1999 on the Bois de Vincennes, whose forest extends at the foot of my building. For several months, I was the cinematographic witness of this disaster which brought down more than half of the 130,000 trees in the Bois.
Autour de 24 Passions is the making-of of my film 24 Passions . It was shot in 2003, on the occasion of the 24th year of filming this film on the Stations of the Cross of Burzet, in Ardèche. (Gérard Courant)
The three presidents for life of the Morlock Academy are assassinated by the Academy's permanent secretary in a peaceful village in Ardèche.
"Every Good Friday, since 1980, I film the ceremonial of the Stations of the Cross of the Passion of Christ in Burzet, in an isolated village in the Ardèche, where the inhabitants, for seven centuries, dress up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Burzet's 2021 Passion of Christ Ceremonial has been canceled. To compensate for this cancellation, I tried an experiment..." Says Alain Paucard of the film: "Courant reworks the images, passing from realism to a sort of expressionism which, enlarging the line, warms it."
Reel 29 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
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.
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)
Reel 2 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
A fake "Cinematon".
Promenade through the district of Bercy in the East of the city of Paris.
