Watch the 7 Hour Trailer for the 720 Hour Film, Ambiancé, the Longest Movie in History

There’s an old tru­ism in Hol­ly­wood that a movie shouldn’t last much longer than the endurance of the aver­age audi­ence member’s blad­der. Most fea­ture films run around an hour and a half to two hours, though sum­mer block­busters can last longer. Stu­dios gen­er­al­ly resist mak­ing long movies for the sim­ple rea­son that they can’t pack as many screen­ings per day. While some art house auteurs have made movies that extend to blad­der-bust­ing lengths – Bela Tarr’s bril­liant Satan­ta­n­go clocks in at sev­en and a half hours – the place to find tru­ly long movies is in the art world.

Chris­t­ian Marclay’s mas­ter­piece The Clock is a 24-hour mon­tage of watch­es, clocks and oth­er time­pieces from icon­ic movies synced to the actu­al time the film is run­ning. Anoth­er incred­i­bly long movie is the apt­ly named A Cure for Insom­nia, which fea­tures artist Lee Groban read­ing a real­ly long poem inter­cut with clips of porn and heavy met­al music. That movie lasts over 3 days. And if you want­ed to watch the entire­ty of Chi­nese artist Ai Wei­wei’s movie Bei­jing 2003 – which doc­u­ments every sin­gle street with­in Beijing’s inner ring – it would take you over a week.

But those films have noth­ing on Swedish artist and film­mak­er Anders Weberg, who is mak­ing Ambiancé, which is, at 720 hours, the longest movie in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma. 720 hours. That’s 30 days. To put this into per­spec­tive, you can watch the entire spe­cial extend­ed cut of the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy over 60 times in the time it takes for Ambiancé to unspool just once. The first trail­er came out July 4th, and it clocks in at 72 min­utes long, mak­ing it almost a fea­ture unto itself. You can see it above. If this seems lengthy – most trail­ers are three or so min­utes after all – note that Weberg promis­es that the next trail­er will last sev­en hours and 20 min­utes.

Weberg describes Ambiancé as a movie where space and time inter­twine “into a sur­re­al dream-like jour­ney beyond places and [it] is an abstract non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive sum­ma­ry of the artist’s time spent with the mov­ing image. 
A sort of mem­oir movie.” As you can see above, the movie fea­tures dense­ly lay­ered images with a haunt­ing, min­i­mal score. Weberg plans to screen the entire­ty of the movie in 2020 on every con­ti­nent simul­ta­ne­ous­ly just once before destroy­ing it. The trail­er is only going to be avail­able until July 20th, so watch it while you can.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clock, the 24-Hour Mon­tage of Clips from Film & TV His­to­ry, Intro­duced by Alain de Bot­ton

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.