Jean-Michel Bouhours

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.

Experimental, 16mm

Found footage film, on the theme of the Spanish Civil War and the popular song "Ay, Carmela !" (or "El Paso del Ebro"), a song composed in 1808 during the liberation war against the Napoleonic invader and which was taken up by the Republican Army and the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

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.

Autonomous part of the film UNDER THE SIGN OF THE LION, corresponding to the letter L. Camera obscura experience. Capture the light ray, place it in a frame, which itself has a second internal frame. Visual effects of flickers and "counterflickers," as in music we speak of on- and off-beats.

This is my first film based on the unity of the photogram, started in the fall of 1975 and finished at the very beginning of the following year. What to do after Sharits, Kubelka, Kren? How to continue their contribution to cinema? Refusing to accept a cinema where the randomness of images would be the rule, I imagined myself inspired by the musical model. [...] I imagined starting from a fixed photograph that was the vision of my window and building from this image chromatic variations that would select parts of the image. The film was written entirely with the help of a score and was inspired by Steve Reich's repetitive music composition models. [...] - JMB

To construct a film in an atomic way, starting from simple elements which combined with each other will produce a whole. Taking the dot as an elementary unit is not a coincidence if we think that the notion of pixels with video images began to occupy people's minds in the 70’s, decades before the arrival of giant led screens. [...] 9, and then 16 screens within one same screen allow an impressive process of simultaneous abstract sequences. The film partition shows a combinatorial process between monochrome colours in the background and pointillist compositions in the foreground. As many sequences as screens; each one is a reflection on abstract images: pointillism, geometrism, "nuagisme" or informal abstraction , are all nods to the history of abstraction in painting: Vassili Kandinsky, Paul Klee, or Augusto Giacometti seem to have been called together within a mondrianesque grid. JMB