Films you Won’t Watch: A Watchlist
This April Fool’s Day we wanted to take a look at films that you’ll probably never watch. These films push limits of both cinema and the human attention span to its extremes with runtimes that would make even the most seasoned movie-goer exhausted.
With the rise of social media, instant gratification, and streaming services that offer “bite sized entertainment” like the ill-fated “Quibi”, it seems that our nation’s attention span is under attack from all angles. Hell, even Netflix recently gave users the options to change the speed at which their film or TV show plays, in case you really just want to charge through something you can speed it up all the way up to 1.5x speed. For some it’s hard to sit through a film without checking their phone, for others, it’s hard to scroll on their phone without a film on in the background. Either way it really seems that all of us have a hard time slowing down in this fast-paced, overstimulating, world of today.
Which is why today we want to look into films that take monotony, time, and the medium of film itself to its furthest extremes. A look into films with extremely long run times. A look into films where you don’t only need to take bathroom breaks, you need to take multiple “good night’s sleep” breaks before you finish the film. A look into films that will make a three hour film look like a short. A look into films that you will not watch.
Effort Justification
Effort Justification is an idea in social science that states that a person will value an outcome that required a lot of effort to achieve, higher than that outcomes objective value, and significantly higher than a similar outcome that took less effort. Meaning that for most of us, we attribute more work to more value, the more effort that goes into completing something, the better that thing is. While this idea is originally rooted in social sciences, this idea can easily be related the viewing of films or the enjoyment of art of any type.
Think of it like this, someone who has read all 1,225 pages of War and Peace is far more likely to brag about it and bring it up at parties than someone who just read the SparkNotes. The same way a person who just sat through the four-part, seven hour film, War and Peaceby Sergei Bondarchuk, is going to feel a sense of superiority to the people who just watched the three and half hour retelling of War and Peace with Henry Fonda and Aurdey Hepburn. This is, in part, because of this idea of Effort Justification.
A longer film will take more physical effort to complete, because of this the people who consume these longer and more exhausting films, are going to think more highly of the films due to their length. A person can watch an hour and a half long “four star” film, and rate it “four stars.” The same person can watch a four-hour “two star” film, and when it is over they will fluff up their score of the film to a “three star” or even “four star” film in order to justify the effort they put into completing the film. It’s easier to discredit the piece of crap hour and a half long film than it is to discredit the piece of crap three-hour film. This is also a large factor in why so many people will continue to watch long TV shows far past their prime, there has been too much effort put in to stop now.
Now this is not to say that long films are inherently bad, but it does make a lot of critiques of longer films less harsh than their shorter counterparts. One pretty mainstream example of this Effort Justification is shown in Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood, the three-hour film that took twelve years to make. Would people like that film as much if it didn’t take 12 years to make? Would it still be a “a moving and memorable viewing experience” (Salon) if the film wasn’t three hours long? If the thoughts of those 12 years of production weren’t always at the back of your head? It is interesting to think about, at times we even try to justify the filmmaker’s efforts and not just our own. Sometimes, we are so in awe at the artists efforts that the flaws of the art are obscured.
Another very recent example of this phenomenon can be seen in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. A four-hour film with a very troubled and tough production. Through the efforts of the filmmakers and a rallying cry on social media from his hordes of fans, the film was recreated and released, four years after its original theatrical run. The fans who put in the effort to bring attention to this film will no doubt like it more than someone who just puts it on, unaware of the behind-the-scenes battle that has taken place to get these images moving in front of them. For a deeper dive into this idea of behind-the-scenes battles and the efforts that go into making a film fit with the director’s original vision, we recommend another recent publication about that very topic.
What Audiences Can Handle and Where
With these two films mentioned above there are a bunch of others that come to mind with longer than usual run times. There have been some long films that have been incredibly commercially successful, like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy with the final film of the trilogy, The Return of the King, screened in theaters at three hours and forty-eight minutes long, with an extended cut that is over four hours. Or, more recently, the two-part superhero blockbuster The Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, together these films clock in at just over five hours and you know there are super fans out there who have watched these two films back-to-back and probably a few others from the Marvel cinematic universe as well.
There is a reason why there really are not many long films released in theaters and it stems from an issue with the way that theaters operate. Movie theaters need money, they need butts in their seats, and this is not an issue for the theaters, it is an issue for the filmmakers and the artists. The film industry, and film production companies cannot encourage long run times as they do not sit well in theaters. The way the industry works from production to screening excludes many longer films from being presented in the way that traditional length films are.
With the recent rise of streaming platforms, however, this issue seems like it will plague filmmakers no longer. From Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, released on Netflix with a runtime of over three hours, to the aforementioned four hour “Snyder Cut,” even to the extended, episodic version of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. It seems that things are looking up for filmmakers who want to experiment with run times, and it seems that there is a lot more acceptance in the film community for these longer, more involved releases.
Enduring any film in the comfort of your home with the luxury of a pause button and a clean bathroom, is always easier than a film in the theater. Even though the experiences are fundamentally different, there are upsides to each, and when it comes to long films, the home theater is the way to go.
Over the last few years there actually has been an increase in the runtime of American films specifically. With 2018 being one of only two years in the history of cinema where the average runtime of films released in the US was over 110 minutes (Towards Data Science). This uptick is due in part to streaming, of course, but also increased endurance of film audiences. We’ve simply grown used to the two-hour runtime, and looking at the trends it seems like our capacity is only getting larger.
When looking into runtimes and how they can impact a film both commercially and artistically, it is really interesting to look at films outside of the U.S. and see how their runtimes compare with ours. Or perhaps, to see how much their audiences can endure compared to ours. The country that immediately comes to mind for many people when discussing films of a longer runtime is Russia.
In part due to epics like War and Peace mentioned earlier, and also in no small part due to famous and iconic Russian filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, who opts for very long and drawn-out scenes in his films and extended run times. The image that sticks out from his catalogue are the few extended sequence of travel in his 1979 film, Stalker. One towards the start of the film as the trio of men ride the rails out of the city and towards “The Zone.” The other comes later on in the film, after they’ve arrived at “The Zone” they walk through a tunnel for what feels like an eternity as we watch the back of one of the men’s head. Or, consider the shot of the men huddled in the destroyed building, sitting back-to-back as rain begins to pour in, and how it is long and lingering.
Even looking to popular and commercially successful Russian films like Burnt by the Sun from 1995 and The Irony of Fate from the 70’s had longer run times than would have been accepted in the U.S. at the time with The Irony of Fate clocking in at just over three-hours, yet it still remains a classic of New Year’s broadcasts in Russia.
All of these factors are at play when we are engaging with film, and they are important to consider when taking deeper dives into this artform. The way we consume film, whether it’s physical discs, streaming, or in a theater. The way we think about film, whether we are taking into account information we had heard about the production, previous works we have seen from the director, or our opinion of an actor in the film. The way we as an audience look at a runtime, do we groan when we see a film is over three hours long, or do we get excited at the thought of being immersed in a new world for that long?
Films You Won’t Watch
While it might be hard for a three-hour film to find a theater that will screen it, how hard must it be for a film of four hours? Or five? Six even? How would you screen a film that takes literal days to complete?
The answer is that for the most part, you don’t. Most films of this nature are saved for festivals or retrospectives, places where people will appreciate the film more than a general audience. However, not all theaters are quite like FACETS, which screened Sátántangó in its 7 hour and 30 minute entirety in back in 2006.
Alternatively, these films might be screened as art installations or in galleries. For the most part, films of this length arguably stop being film in the traditional sense and begin to fall into the territory of “Video Art” of “Experimental Film.” Nonetheless, we are going to dive into these films and explore what they mean, why they were made, and why they are so damn long.
Park Lanes
8 hours
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson
A film following the workers of a factory in Virginia as they work through a typical eight-hour workday, the way the film is edited allows the viewer to experience these hours pass in real time. The film itself is a workday, where us as viewers have the job of spectators, or managers, or a security camera, watching as the events of the day unfold in this factory. Park Lanes was filmed over the course of a week and edited down to the length of one workday. It attempts to find hidden truths and beauty in the monotony of everyday life and the drudgery of factory work, while creating a unique connection between an intentionally difficult film, and the concept of effort justification, or “labor” justification.
An interesting comparison to this film would be the works of famous documentarian Frederick Wiseman. In his work, while he was not actively trying to distort reality while making his films, he did not ask direct questions to the subjects of the documentary, he did not intentionally edit anyone to look bad or stupid in the style of Michael Moore. No, Frederick Wiseman lets the events unfold in front of him and his camera and just films whats happens. However, these filming sessions would often result in hundreds of hours of footage, resulting in Wiseman needing to cut it all down into a consumable three or four hours. Therein lies the subjectivity, therein lies the deviation from the reality of the situation. There is no editing in real life, any footage cut is a deviation from the truth and a conscious choice that the director is making.
Thinking about this in comparison to Park Lanes is interesting. When the focus leaves one worker what happens? Do they keep working like normal, or do they slack off a little bit now that the man with the camera is gone? Many questions arise but one thing is for sure, by pushing the boundaries of the runtime of his documentary Kevin Jerome Everson’s film is taken to a whole new level of truth seeking through his depiction of labor and the spectacle therein.
Labor has been integral to the history of cinema since the very beginning. Not just the labor and the work of the people who create the films and build the sets and all that but really films have been made for the people, for the laborers. One of the early Lumière brother films from 1895 titled Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. One of the earliest films and earliest documentaries depicts work and labor conditions at the end of the 19th century. Cut 125 years later, a new exploration on labor and the lives of the masses, arrives and begs the question, has anything really changed?
Check out more of Kevin Jerome Everson’s work at the Chicago Video Data Bank.
Watch Park Lanes streaming now on the Criterion Channel.
Empire
8 hours and 5 minutes
Directed by Andy Warhol
A film by the infamous artist Andy Warhol. A single shot of the Empire State Building from the evening of one day, until 3am the next. We see the sun set on the Empire State Building, we see the lights of it flash on as the light around it dims. The night draws on until the lights on the building shut off too, leaving the audience in total darkness. We never see the sun rise. Clouds move and shift, and there is no sign of humanity aside from the buildings that exist on the screen from the start to the end. This film is undoubtedly pretentious, it does not require your utmost attention, and it absolutely doesn’t need to be watched in its entirety.
With all that being said, however, this film is incredibly important in the history of Avant-Garde Cinema, and viewing can lead to profound insights on life, art, and film itself.
Interestingly enough, while this film seems like it would be an installation piece at a gallery, or in a setting more relating to the fine arts, it was actually shown at a movie theater. The City Hall Cinema in Manhattan. There are stories that apparently at around the ten-to-twenty-minute mark people got up from their seats, left and demanded a refund. No one really knows if these stories are true, as no one really knows how many people showed up to see the film, but one can imagine how a theater full of movie goers would react to a single shot of a building for eight hours.
Rent Empire now from FACETS.
La Flor (The Flower)
13 hours and 53 minutes
Directed by Mariano Llinás
A film that seems to be best summed up by the sigil that adorns its minimalist poster (see below). The sigil is a minimalist depiction of a flower, opting to use arrows instead of pedals, or stems, or seeds. There are four arrows pointing up at the top of the flower, making up the pedals (the pretty part) of the flower. These four arrows curve to the middle of the flower to meet lines and combine near a fifth arrow that runs in a circle, almost self-contained compared to the rest of the arrows. The final arrow stems from the bottom of the circle arrow, cuts through it almost and points down to the bottom of the poster.
How does this sum up the film’s narrative? Well, La Flor is not just one film, but six short films that play out across the thirteen hour run time. The first four films contain the beginning of a story but lack an end. The fifth film is the closest to a “normal” film in it has a beginning a middle and an end, all presented directly to the audience. The sixth and final film of La Flor is just an ending to a story we didn’t see the start of. With all this in mind, take a look at the arrows again and see how it connects.
These six films are unrelated aside from an on-screen appearance by the director Mariano Llinás, who appears and explains the structure of the film, similar to what is written above. Each film takes on different styles of filmmaking, from the first being similar to a “B-Movie” with the fourth being an experimental meta-narrative story about the characters of the film interacting with the film itself.
This film is an exploration of everything that a film can be, without the restraints of a commercially acceptable runtime, without the restraints of traditional storytelling conventions, and without confusion of what is intended by the film. In other films that have an unconventional structure, audiences can get annoyed or mad if a film ends too suddenly, or if something doesn’t make sense. With the insertion of himself into the film the director eliminates any confusion about the purpose of the film. A truly unique and intentional experience that really feels like it earns it’s run time by constantly moving and trying out new and interesting ideas in the medium of cinema.
Watch La Flor streaming now on the Criterion Channel.
Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (The Innocence)
21 hours and 5 minutes
Directed by Ashraf Shishir
This black and white 2019 Bangladeshi film is currently the longest non-experimental narrative film ever produced. Focused on love, dreams, politics, revolution, and the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, this film explores of one of the poorest developing countries where, against all odds, people began filmmaking.
This film took nine years to make with a total of 176 days of filming and a crew of over four thousand. An epic undertaking for an epic film, with a runtime that is seven hours longer than the next film that even comes close to this runtime. There is truly nothing else like this film, not even close. It is a triumph of filmmaking and a challenge that few artists or craftsmen could accomplish. It is a feat of shear endurance and will.
While all of the above is true, Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo is also a film that is “dedicated to all who have dreamt of cinema their whole lives but have gained nothing in the end” – an almost self-deprecating dedication, and a line that resonates with the idea of effort justification that has been discussed throughout this publication. An anti-film and anti-cinema sentiment from a film that steeps you in a world of cinema and film for almost an entire day. Choices in a film like this need to be examined critically as they seem to be far more intentional than a traditional film.
The fact that it is in black and white makes it harder for the film to mimic reality, as it adds the connotation of being “old” or existing in days long past. How do these choices benefit the message of the film, how do these ideas call back to the dedication? When a film is an hour and a half long it is easy to understand why it is that length, it is easy to understand the work that goes into that because everyone else making films does the same thing. When it comes to a work like this that is so singular, so strange, and so monolithic, all these questions get raised. Why twenty one hours? Why open a film that seems so triumphant in its production and its story with a line to put everyone down?
There is plenty of time to ponder all these questions and more during the films twenty-one hour run time. This film is a challenge to watch, it is a world record holder, and it has a wholly unique outlook on cinema as a whole.
24 Hour Psycho
24 hours
Directed by Douglas Gordan
This interesting installation art piece has its roots in a true classic of cinema. This art piece by Douglas Gordan is a re-edit of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho. The film was taken by Gordan and re-edited so that the film ran at 2-frames-per-second as opposed to the usual 24-frames-per-second, that most films run at. This in essence stretched out time to a surreal and dizzying extreme. It took every second of the film and made it 12 seconds, it took every minute of the original film and made it unbearably long. It took the original runtime of Psycho (an hour and forty-nine minutes) and made it twenty-four-hours long.
The installation film is an important early work in the career of this artist, and it explores a lot of interesting themes that can be seen not only in Gordan’s other works, but in other artworks that share the same methods of appropriation and authorship. Exploring themes of repetition and recognition, time and memory, endurance and strength, darkness and light. A similar effect can be seen here as when watching Empire where nothing much is happening so the viewer begins to think things are, maybe seeing things that aren’t really there to fill in the gap that is left in the mind, the gap that wants something to be there.
Psycho is such a dense and important work that it not only inspired this art piece, but it also inspired a shot-for-shot remake by director Gus Van Sant and is the jumping off point for the exploratory documentary 78/52 which explores the iconic “shower scene” and breaks it down to its basics and discusses its 78 set ups and its 52 cuts. An interesting parallel between this art piece and this documentary is how slowing the film down is the basis for both.
Perhaps the original Psycho is so dense or so perfect that this is the only way to truly get it, to study it obsessively. In the same vein, the shot-for-shot remake obsessively tries to recreate the feel and the effect of the original, but for many it falls short while remaining a cool experiment nonetheless.
Rent Psychonow from FACETS.
Rent Gus Van Sant’s Psycho now from FACETS.
Logistics
857 Hours (35 days, 17 hours)
Directed by Daniel Andersson and Ericka Magnusson
The longest film of all time, clocking in at 35 days and 17 hours so be sure to grab some popcorn when you sit down to watch this one. Logistics is a 2012 Swedish art film that attempts to explain where all of our modern conveniences come from. Specifically, it hoped to shed light on how little we know about the production of our phones, tablets, computers, and other smart devices that we have grown so attached to.
The film follows (in reverse order) the entire history of a pedometer. Starting with when it sells in a store and tracking backwards to its origin and manufacturer. Sort of like The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonor Mementobut for a pedometer.
The film follows each step of this products production in real time, so it is a really unique travel film where you can see the route from Sweden to China in a very confusing manner with lots of added stops along the way. Most of this film is spent on a large freight carrying boat in the middle of the ocean. It is an incredibly interesting idea and was actually screened once at a library from start to finish, where people could pop in an out and see what stage of production the pedometer was on.
It is an art piece and an installation piece, and the filmmakers own admission that it is an experience meant to “checked in on” more than watched intensely makes it slightly more approachable.
An hour and ten minute cut of the film available for free that condenses all the action of a month into a consumable piece of media. This is an interesting art piece in a lot of ways, especially when considering its relationship to cinema and film in the modern age. When we think about how we check out gadgets while watching films that aren’t meant to be “checked in on,” and this film about making gadgets is quite literally meant to be checked in on.
Check out the 72 minute cut of Logistics here.
Tyler Meder is an Editorial Assistant Intern at FACETS. He received his B.A. in Communication, Film, and New Media from Carthage College after completing his thesis on shot on video horror films. He has contributed work in video and writing to multiple industries including live theatre, which earned him an honors in Animation and Video Production from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
