Movies: Gérard Courant

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 allo...

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 an...

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 i...

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Nora and Jock arrive in the strange village of Litan during the Festival of the Dead....

1300 meters from the arrival of the 13th stage Carpentras-Orcières Merlette (192 kms), then, in the Col de Sauze, the 14th stage Orcières-Merlette-Briançon (201 kms) of the Tour de France 1972. Filmmaker Gérard Courant photographed Eddy Merckx (yell...

"Ponts routiers de la Seine à Paris" is a film series that shows, in a single fixed, wide and silent plan all the bridges (and bridges) that span the Seine in Paris. (Rail bridges and motorway bridges on the ring road are excluded). The bridges are f...

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...

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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 Zavat...

Reel 18 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series....

Michel Foucault Werner Schroeter, La Conversation is the third of the four film encounters I have had with Werner Schroeter. Unlike the first two, this time a personality from outside the German filmmaker's work joined the meeting. But what a persona...

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Reel 40 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series....

Reel 27 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series....

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this relig...

Reel 14 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series....

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are...

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic...

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