Fugues d'été : La Fage

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

"One year before the massacre of Tian An Men [...] a few hundred meters from this immense square, where the tanks were going to crush the resistance, under the debonair gaze of Mao [...] I was loaned a tiny, autofocus camera, allowing me to shoot without framing, the lens wedged on my right hip. Everything is captured in clusters of images, edited directly into the camera. The diary of a stroller who travels through Beijing on foot and by bicycle - a cyclist among the cyclists who circulate in slow and tight flows." - Sudre