Gérard Courant
Directing
Biography
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.
Known For
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.
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
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.
Cinématon
Reel 36 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XXXVI
Reel 11 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XI
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.
Litan
Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"
Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante
Reel 19 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XIX
Reel 29 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XXIX
A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
Abel Ferrara in Lucca
"On the occasion of the premiere of Nel Regno di Napoli in Cannes in 1978, Werner Schroeter gave me an audio interview about this film and about his work in general. Our meeting took place on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, in the midst of excitement of the Cannes festival life, a few days after the screening of Nel Regno di Napoli and in the presence of the photographer Jean-Claude Moireau. Vivre à Naples et mourir is the audio capture of that informal meeting that happened on 20 May 1978 and which is, as per director's wish, more like a casual conversation than an interview in the strict sense of the term (a set of questions and answers).
Vivre à Naples et Mourir (Entretien avec Werner Schroeter)
No description available.
Werner et Nenad
No description available.
Un cinéaste qui ne tient pas la caméra est comme un peintre qui ne tient pas le pinceau (Conversation avec Teo Hernandez II)
I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.
Les Jours et les Nuits
Reel 18 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon XVIII
No description available.
Petite intrusion dans l’univers incandescent de Werner Schroeter
No description available.
We Must Save Him! (interview with Werner Schroeter)
Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.
Dubai Winter Diary VI: Light and Reflections
Portrait de groupe is a film series of filmed portraits that shows all kinds of groups gathered under family pretexts, friendly or professional, in a single fixed, wide shot (style: family photo) and silent of 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
Portrait de groupe
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.
Up and Down
Reel 26 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.