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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.
A couple (Karin Thome and Eberhard Klasse), whose relationship can't hold up to the pressure of their financial and career problems, only have their child left as the remaining connecting link. But even their child becomes a pawn in their egoistic power games and possessiveness. The crisis reaches a peak first then, when the husband finds out about an affair that the wife is having and sets out to claim the same rights for himself. This takes him to New York, where he settles. The wife gets her hands on all the cash reserves and follows him there. In spite of the new location, they still remain a couple with a disturbed and insensitive miscommunication, that instinctively cling even more to each other in the new and alienating environment.
