Gérard Courant
Birthday: 1951-12-04 Place of Birth: Lyon, France
Synopsis
Gérard Courant is a French filmmaker, writer, actor, poet and independent producer born on December 4, 1951 in Lyon, France. He is the son of the writer and historian René Courant. He is one of the most prolific filmmakers of cinema. He created, directed and produced Cinématon, the longest film in the world (over 200 hours long). In all, he has shot nearly 7,000 filmed portraits and a very large number of other films (more than 1,000) since the mid-1970s. He has also published several books on cinema.
Acting
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.
