Marcel Hanoun

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.

In 1963, the businessman Juan Huarte Beaumont, art patron, collector and founder of X Films, a film production company based in Madrid, invited the Basque artists Nestor Basterretxea and Jorge Oteiza to make a promotional short about his companies. Certain conditions were attached to the commission: the artists were each to present finished scripts without any contact with each other about them. Huarte chose Basterretxea's script, and Basterretxea directed the film, which was given the title 'Operación H' in postproduction.

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

Françoise, a thirty-year-old single typist lives only for her Sunday release. On this day, she attends a horse race under pretext of perfecting her taste for elegance and refinement. Georges, a neighbor widower, begins to court her.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Deeply moved by the Bosnian tragedy and, more specifically, by the nightmare that the inhabitants of Sarajevo have been living for two years, the filmmaker Marcel Hanoun, like other great creators (from Susan Sontag to Juan Goytisolo), wanted to give testimony. He has made a superb film-poem in homage to this young Bosnian couple (belonging to two enemy communities) that was killed by an anonymous sniper on Liberty Bridge, in the summer of 1993, as they were trying to flee from the besieged city. ("Le Monde Diplomatique", 1994)

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.

On a Mediterranean cruise, a young man hired as a tour guide is intrigued by the beauty of a female interpreter hiding behind her sunglasses. He makes advances to her by venturing into a series of strange stories.

One of four Hanoun films that take their titles from the seasons of the year, SPRING tells two parallel stories: a man, fleeing the forces of order, takes refuge in the forest, while a young girl living with her grandmother in a nearby village approaches the threshold of adolescence, and begins to discover both the world and herself. - Anthology Film Archive

In a montage alternating with moments of Nigel Rogers' interpretation of the most beautiful passages from "Orpheus," the opera by Striggio and Monteverdi, La Nuit Claire is an evocation of the celebrated myth, within which images of the love between its two modern protagonists, Anne and Julien, are inscribed. - BAM/PFA

The theme of Romeo and Juliet is the starting point from which the film spins a web of several stories. A love story between a boy and a girl whose families are Algerian: they are young, beautiful and they are trying to build a family and a social life in France. They love each other, and yet conflicts, family pressure and contradicting desires alternately tear them apart and unite them. The story of Romeo and Juliet, minus death.

A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John.

The shooting diary of a film shot in France and in the United States. Using photos of Paris and of New York City, excerpts of his former films, statements by friends of his and shooting sequences of the film itself, tormented filmmaker Marcel Hanoun has made a heterogeneous and unclassifiable film about the difficulty of filming.

A couple takes charge of mounting the film of love and war of a filmmaker friend faded away.

A documentary in which Marcel Hanoun examines, delimits, paces up and down and criss-crosses the town of Langres, offering the houses, walls and everything which makes up the identity of a place, an opportunity to express themselves through the time of seasons but through that of History.

A couple in a hotel room in Brussels. A painting by Brueghel. In this painting, a mystery.

This film presents a harsh critique of the Koranic teaching through the tragic story of a small talibé, student of a beggar.

During the summer of 1968, a young French woman staying in an isolated country house reflects upon her involvement in the events of that May.

A baker knew the cosmonaut child who now revolves around Earth.