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.

Reel 8 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

The three presidents for life of the Morlock Academy are assassinated by the Academy's permanent secretary in a peaceful village in Ardèche.

On the occasion of the passing of Marcel Hanoun, Gérard Courant wanted to pay tribute to this companion whom he had known since 1975 by accompanying him with the song Avec le temps by Léo Ferré.

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.

The filming of Joseph Morder's Cinématon n°1968.

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.

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)

Reel 2 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 30 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.

During a shoot with an Eagle K4 camera, a failure caused freeze-ups with abstract shapes.

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 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

An ongoing collection of single static shot, mute, showing a view of the cinema facades where Cinematons have been screened.