Gérard Courant is a French film­mak­er, who, at least until 2011, held the dis­tinc­tion of direct­ing the longest film ever made. Clock­ing in at 192 hours, and shot over 36 years (1978–2006), Ciné­ma­ton con­sist­ed of “a series of over 2,880 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.” Ken Loach, Wim Wen­ders, Ter­ry Gilliam, Julie Delpy all made appear­ances. And so too did Jean-Luc Godard. (See below.)

While mak­ing Ciné­ma­ton, Courant also cre­at­ed anoth­er kind of exper­i­men­tal film — what he calls “com­pressed” films. In 1995, he shot Com­pres­sion de Alphav­ille, an accel­er­at­ed homage to Jean-Luc Godard 1965 sci-fi film, Alphav­ille. Then came a “com­pres­sion” (top) of Godard­’s À bout de souffle/Breathless (1960), the clas­sic of French New Wave cin­e­ma.

Dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s, when Courant came of age as a film­mak­er, sculp­tors like César Bal­dac­ci­ni cre­at­ed art by com­press­ing every­day objects–like Coke cans–into mod­ern sculp­tures. So Courant took things a step fur­ther and fig­ured why not com­press art itself. Why not com­press a 90 minute film into 3–4 min­utes, while keep­ing the plot of the orig­i­nal film firm­ly intact.

Along the way, Courant asked him­self: Do com­pressed films hon­or the orig­i­nal? Does one have the right to touch these mas­ter­pieces? And can one decom­press these com­pressed films and then return them to their orig­i­nal form? Pon­der these ques­tions as you watch the exam­ples above.

Note: If you read French, Courant gives more of the back­sto­ry on his com­pressed films here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of Han­nah Arendt’s “On the Nature of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

Jef­fer­son Air­plane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Cap­tures It (1968)

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: From Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

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Jim Jar­musch, like his younger com­pa­tri­ots in film­mak­ing Quentin Taran­ti­no and Wes Ander­son, made his name as much with his taste as with his body of work. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that he’s made his name in large part by mak­ing films shaped by, and show­cas­ing, that taste. This seems to have held espe­cial­ly true in the case of Only Lovers Left Alive, his most recent fea­ture, which focus­es on a mar­ried cou­ple of vam­pire aes­thetes who split their time between her place in Tang­i­er stacked with yel­lowed vol­umes of poet­ry, and his decay­ing Detroit Vic­to­ri­an decked out with a noise-rock record­ing stu­dio and an iPhone patched through an old tube tele­vi­sion.

So Jar­musch’s fans will by def­i­n­i­tion have some famil­iar­i­ty with the direc­tor’s pref­er­ences in cloth­ing, music, Euro­pean cul­tures, and nich­es of Amer­i­cana. But what about in oth­er movies? Here we have a top ten list from the mak­er of Per­ma­nent Vaca­tion, Mys­tery Train, and Night on Earth, orig­i­nal­ly com­posed for the British Film Insti­tute’s 2002 Sight and Sound top ten poll. Three of Jar­musch’s selec­tions you can watch online here, or find them in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

1. L’Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)
2. Tokyo Sto­ry (1953, Yasu­jiro Ozu)
3. They Live by Night (1949, Nicholas Ray)
4. Bob le Flam­beur (1955, Jean-Pierre Melville)
5. Sun­rise (1927, F.W. Mur­nau) 
6. The Cam­era­man (1928, Buster Keaton/Edward Sedg­wick) 
7. Mouchette (1967, Robert Bres­son)
8. Sev­en Samu­rai (1954, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa)
9. Bro­ken Blos­soms (1919, D.W. Grif­fith) 
10. Rome, Open City (1945, Rober­to Rosselli­ni)

The true Jar­musch enthu­si­ast will imme­di­ate­ly notice a num­ber of con­nec­tions between his own pic­tures and those he names as his favorites. He began his career work­ing as an assis­tant to the direc­tor of They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray (and you can even glimpse Jar­musch in Light­ning Over Water, Wim Wen­ders’ doc­u­men­tary on Ray’s final years).

Jar­musch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samu­rai shares not just tit­u­lar but philo­soph­i­cal qual­i­ties with Kuro­sawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai. With Bob le Flam­beur, Jean-Pierre Melville gave birth to cin­e­mat­ic “cool,” a tra­di­tion Jar­musch has done his lev­el best to uphold. And if D.W. Grif­fith’s Bro­ken Blos­soms sounds a bit like Bro­ken Flow­ers, the sim­i­lar­i­ties — the indi­rect ones, at least — don’t end there.

And all cinephiles, Jar­musch fans or oth­er­wise, will notice that he has includ­ed not a sin­gle col­or film among his top ten. Some of this might have to do with his gen­er­al­ly retro sen­si­bil­i­ty (some­thing to which even casu­al view­ers of his work can attest), but the likes of Stranger Than Par­adise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes sug­gest that he him­self counts as one of the finest users of black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the mod­ern day. The vivid col­ors Yorick Le Saux cap­tured for him in Only Lovers Left Alive (and Christo­pher Doyle did in its pre­de­ces­sor, The Lim­its of Con­trol), sug­gest that Jar­musch’s uni­verse exists equal­ly well in both visu­al realms, but speak­ing from my own Jar­musch fan­dom, I do hope he has at least one more black-and-white pic­ture in him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Short Films on Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes from Jim Jar­musch & Paul Thomas Ander­son

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sun­rise, the 1927 Mas­ter­piece Vot­ed the 5th Best Movie of All Time

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing might have left crit­ics scratch­ing their heads when it first came out, but it has since come to be rec­og­nized as a hor­ror mas­ter­piece. The film is both styl­is­ti­cal­ly dis­tinc­tive – those long track­ing shots, the one-point per­spec­tive, that com­plete­ly amaz­ing car­pet­ing – and nar­ra­tive­ly open-end­ed. Kubrick freights the movie with lots of sig­ni­fiers with­out clear­ly point­ing out what they sig­ni­fy: Like why is there Native Amer­i­can imagery through­out the film? Why is Jack Nichol­son writ­ing his mas­ter­piece on a Ger­man type­writer? And, for that mat­ter, why is he read­ing a Play­girl mag­a­zine while wait­ing for his job inter­view? The mul­ti­va­lence of The Shin­ing inspired a whole fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about the mean­ing of the movie called Room 237, where var­i­ous the­o­rists talk through their inter­pre­ta­tions. Is it pos­si­ble that the movie is both about the hor­rors of the Holo­caust and about the stag­ing of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing?

So per­haps it isn’t sur­pris­ing that The Shin­ing has been the fod­der for film­mak­ers to impose their own mean­ing on the flick. A cou­ple recent video pieces have reimag­ined the movie as shot by two of the reign­ing auteurs of cin­e­ma – Wes Ander­son and David Lynch.

Wes Ander­son is, of course, the film­mak­er of such twee, for­mal­ly exact­ing works as The Roy­al Tenen­baums, Moon­rise King­dom and, most recent­ly, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Film­mak­er Steve Rams­den cre­ates a quick and wit­ty mash up of The Over­look Hotel and the Grand Budapest. The video rais­es all sorts of ques­tions. How, for exam­ple, would The Shin­ing have been dif­fer­ent with an offi­cious concierge with a pen­cil mus­tache? You can see Wes Anderson’s The Shin­ing above.

Of the two film­mak­ers, David Lynch is the­mat­i­cal­ly clos­er to Kubrick. Both have made vio­lent, con­tro­ver­sial movies that plumb the murky depths of the mas­cu­line mind. Both have made inno­v­a­tive films that play on mul­ti­ple lev­els. And both made movies that com­plete­ly freaked me out as a teenag­er. Kubrick was even a big fan of Lynch. In his book Catch­ing the Big Fish: Med­i­ta­tion, Con­scious­ness, and Cre­ativ­i­ty, Lynch recalls meet­ing Kubrick, and Kubrick telling the young film­mak­er that Eraser­head was his favorite movie. If that does­n’t pro­vide you with a lifetime’s worth of val­i­da­tion, I don’t know what will.

Richard Veri­na crams every sin­gle Lynchi­an quirk into his eight-minute video – from creepy red cur­tains to dream-like super­im­po­si­tions to real­ly inter­est­ing light fix­tures. Sure, the piece might be a minute or two too long but for hard­core fans this piece is a hoot. Veri­na even man­ages to work in ref­er­ences to Lynch’s bête noir, Dune. You can see Blue Shin­ing above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

The Mak­ing of The Shin­ing

Saul Bass’ Reject­ed Poster Con­cepts for The Shin­ing (and His Pret­ty Excel­lent Sig­na­ture)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Cities as we know them came into being when they indus­tri­al­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Film as we know it came into being when its own indus­try devel­oped in the 20th. And so film came into its own in an era when cities around the world had become the most fas­ci­nat­ing places going. It makes sense, then, that ear­ly motion pic­tures — even the very ear­li­est, in the form of the Lumière broth­ers’ shots of the streets of 1980s Lyon — often took cities as their sub­jects.

“The 1920s were a key decade in the devel­op­ment of cities,” writes urban car­tog­ra­ph­er and explor­er Eric Bright­well. Not only did that era see the begin­ning of the preser­va­tion move­ment, “built around the notion that archi­tec­ture and his­to­ry were some­times as worth pre­serv­ing as wilder­ness and nature,” but “the 1920 cen­sus revealed that for the first time more Amer­i­cans lived in cities than the coun­try. Le Cor­busier began writ­ing his series, ‘1925 Expo: Arts Déco,’ and Art Deco soon became one of the archi­tec­tur­al styles most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with high-ris­es.”

Bright­well adds that “the 1920s also gave rise to the city sym­pho­ny.” They’ve been loose­ly defined “as a poet­ic, exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary that presents a por­trait of dai­ly life with­in a city while attempt­ing to cap­ture some­thing of the city’s spir­it.”

Some impor­tant exam­ples with­in the genre include films such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheel­er’s short Man­hat­ta (1921), Alber­to Cav­al­can­ti’s Rien que les heures (1926) on Paris, Wal­ter Ruttman­n’s Berlin: Die Sin­fonie der Großs­tadt (1927), André Sauvage’s Études sur Paris (1928), Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man With a Movie Cam­era (1929), Adal­ber­to Keme­ny and Rudolf Rex Lustig’s São Paulo, Sin­fo­nia da Metró­pole (1929), and Alexan­der Ham­mid’s Bezúčel­ná procház­ka (1930). (Even fic­tion films of the era took notice of the new urban con­di­tion in a big way; see, to name one obvi­ous exam­ple, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis.)

These films, each of a slight­ly dif­fer­ent and some­times more than slight­ly exper­i­men­tal form, do indeed cap­ture the sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty that only a city can give off. Alas, the next eighty years of the 20th century—a time when even some of the great­est metrop­o­lis­es would suf­fer pop­u­la­tion exo­dus, free­way-build­ing, and “urban renew­al” in all its forms—wouldn’t treat cities very well. But they’ve now made a come­back, sig­naled by the much-dis­cussed fact that, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, more human beings every­where live in cities than not. Maybe this new era of cities will bring about a new era of city sym­phonies. If so, its film­mak­ers will cer­tain­ly have a rich tra­di­tion to work with.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Paris Through Pen­tax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Czech cin­e­ma gained inter­na­tion­al acclaim in the 1960s with films like Close­ly Watched Trains (1966) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) – movies that con­flat­ed the polit­i­cal with the sex­u­al in ways that were as inno­v­a­tive as they were sub­ver­sive. Much of the fuel of this New Wave of Czech film was the utter absur­di­ty of the Com­mu­nist rule and the hor­rors inflict­ed by the Nazis. Yet beneath that, there’s some­thing with­in Czech cul­ture that seems nat­u­ral­ly skep­ti­cal of author­i­ty. Franz Kaf­ka was a native of Prague, after all. And one of the most beloved books in the Czech lan­guage is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Sol­dier Šve­jk (1923), a fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous satire on the idio­cy of war.

The works of Czech film­mak­er Gus­tav Machatý weren’t overt­ly polit­i­cal yet they were still very sub­ver­sive. At a time when the bat­tles for uni­ver­sal suf­frage was still a recent mem­o­ry, Machatý had the audac­i­ty to show women as sex­u­al­ly autonomous beings.

Born in Prague in 1901, Machatý went to Hol­ly­wood at a young age and report­ed­ly appren­ticed under D. W. Grif­fith and Erich von Stro­heim. When he returned to his home coun­try, he start­ed mak­ing movies.

Machatý’s third fea­ture and final silent movie was Erotikon (1929), a sto­ry about a coun­try girl seduced by an upper-class cad only to get preg­nant and ostra­cized by her vil­lage. The film recalls F.W. Mur­nau in his empha­sis on faces and his expres­sion­is­tic use of the cam­era. This is per­haps most clear­ly seen in the scene above where the girl sur­ren­ders to her slick para­mour and dis­cov­ers sex­u­al bliss. The cam­era spins around as she writhes on the bed. Show­ing female sex­u­al­i­ty frankly was dar­ing at that time. Women in movies by D. W. Grif­fith and Char­lie Chap­lin were chaste and pure. They received male appetites, per­haps, but were not sub­ject to ani­mal­is­tic urges them­selves.

Four years lat­er, Machatý went even fur­ther with his movie Ekstase (1933). Ear­ly in the movie, we see the lumi­nous­ly beau­ti­ful Hedy Lamarr skin­ny-dip­ping in a pond. When her horse runs off with her clothes, she run naked over hill and dale to catch it. A bit lat­er in the movie, in a scene that recalls Erotikon, she has an earth-shat­ter­ing orgasm thanks to the strap­ping young work­er who finds her horse. Ekstase might not be the first non-porno­graph­ic film to have nude scenes but it was cer­tain­ly one of the first. And it was def­i­nite­ly the first film to clear­ly show a female orgasm.

The movie was an inter­na­tion­al sen­sa­tion. It received raves at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val only to be denied a prize because the Vat­i­can object­ed. Worse, it couldn’t get a prop­er release in the US. First Ekstase was seized by U.S. Cus­toms as pornog­ra­phy. Then, when it final­ly cleared that hur­dle, the movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s self-cen­sor­ing Hays Code. Ekstase only man­aged to screen in a hand­ful of inde­pen­dent the­aters in 1940, sev­en years after it first came out.

Nonethe­less, the noto­ri­ety of the movie turned Hedy Lamarr into a star and soon she was star­ring oppo­site Hol­ly­wood icons like Jim­my Stew­art and Clark Gable. (And just in case you thought that Lamarr was just a pret­ty face, she also co-invent­ed and patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy dur­ing WWII that laid the ground­work for things like Wi-Fi.)

Machatý had less suc­cess. As the threat of Nazism loomed, he fled back to Hol­ly­wood and end­ed up being an uncred­it­ed direc­tor for such stu­dio films as The Good Earth and Madame X. He spent the last part of his life teach­ing film at the Munich Film School before dying in 1963.

You can watch the entire­ty of Erotikon below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fritz Lang’s M: Watch the Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Kafka’s Famous Char­ac­ter Gre­gor Sam­sa Meets Dr. Seuss in a Great Radio Play

Broke­back Before Broke­back: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cin­e­ma (1927)

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. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.