Legendary drag performer Ocaña in performance with a cardboard Marilyn on the west side of the Berlin Wall.

"This is the story of a search, that of a woman in pursuit of her own identity. This woman, Marie-Noëlle Kauffmann, ventures into the world of representation, meets four characters who, each in their own way, give her a key to cross the five sequences/initiations of the film which are all benchmarks that she must absolutely cross to have an answer to the question: Can cinema help find a lost balance?" -Gerard Courant

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

Ulrich Gregor is filmed in his office at the Berlin Film Festival surrounded by the festival's poster (The Great Family of René Magritte).

"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

A woman's face under the light of life.

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Reel 5 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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!"

Gérard Courant films the routes of his voyage in Greece with a Super8 camera. Reflections, waves, ports and landscapes are edited at a dizzying pace; in their midst, portraits appear of a very beautiful woman, along with images of the director who turns the camera on himself, showing his face reddened by the sun.

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.

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

An auspicious day to fill as Paris wakes up under a thick layer of snow; Dévotion is wandering to the Palais de Chaillot through a paralyzed Paris.