Christian Lebrat

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.

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

"In Trama, Lebrat divides a surface vertically to be filmed in six equal segments of color (yellow, red, blue, green, violet, orange). The composition stays exactly the same all the way through the film. The filmmaker puts a band on the side of every two or three frames. Constructed step-by-step, using ten bands, the optical mixture of color induces strange pulsating effects." Raphaël Bassan

First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.

The densest film of the divided-frame group is the aptly titled 1978 Networks, which includes as many as 20 exposures of the same roll of film. Here only one slit was used, but Lebrat combines within one image many narrow strips taken at diverse Paris locations, sometimes seen through colored filters. The enclosed, even claustrophobic space of the strips contrasts with Lebrat’s superimposition of them and with the movement within the strips and by the strips within the frame... (Fred Camper)

9 key moving image works created by filmmaker Christian Lebrat over a ten-year period (1976-1985). Each film focus on an aspect of his experimentation with the use of color in cinema.

"Christian Lebrat said he thought of Monet, who painted with the series Water Lilies colors ‘at the edge of the visible;’ those of Holon indeed display colors so intense, so enraged with energy that they release in a pure way the performative, exclamative character, the character of act which, in a more or less underground way, informs every image." Nicole Brenez