Cinématon n°52 : F.J. Ossang

Sha-Dada is an "expanded" film on two screens which presents itself as a confrontation between two imperialisms.

15 years through Le Bois de Vincennes - The "before" and "after" 1999 storm destructions.

Two young girls meet, Reinette from the countryside and Mirabelle from Paris, and decide to take a flat together in Paris where they attend University. Four successive stories about their daily lives illustrate the very different views, characters and relation to the world of these two friends.

"In this journey, Courant's heroine wanders through the clouds and Pyrenees mountains way after the world's destruction [...] Songs by Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe and Leonard Cohen, scores by Vivaldi, Kraftwerk and Johan Strauss, they all form this eclectic and defying musical atmosphere from which Courant dreams about a point of view that would allow him to find a rhythm in a constantly changing abysmal paradise" -Diego Trerotola

Married couple Jock & Nora are visiting the town of Litan during Litan's Day, with its carnivalesque atmosphere. When Nora wakes that morning from dreaming the bizarre death of her husband, she sets out across town to find him and warn him. But as she does, she encounters stranger and stranger people and events erupting into a frenzy in front of her. Now, she and Jock must elude all of the impediments in their way of reaching safety on the outskirts of town.

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 young man tired of writing and rewriting a screenplay decides to begin a Super 8mm film diary. He films his parents and those close to him and determines to tell the about his homosexuality.

A bicycle race is held every year in a pass of the Alps called Parpaillon. With the energy of a skillful cyclist perhaps as a great tribute to François, the mailman played by Tati in The Big Day, Moullet makes a comedy by pedaling at a pace that allows him to reinvent the possibilities of film gags.

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

Couple is a cinematic series of portrait films, which show two persons, who free to do what they wish, in a fixed camera shot of 3:20 minutes.

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 21 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Zones césariennes (which covers the year 2002) is one of Gérard Courant's Filmed Notebooks shot on film. These episodes now coexist with their counterparts filmed on videotape. They are two films with parallel lives but opposing destinies, colliding and eyeing each other warily. They represent two approaches, two styles, two different ways of understanding cinema. Two methods for unfolding time, grasping memory, and exploring the world.