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, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Terry Gilliam, and Julie Delpy all made appearances.

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?

via Open Culture