Today is Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, Maine and, for some reason, Wisconsin. (Get your own holiday, Wisconsin!) In the Boston area, however, this day – when the Boston Marathon is run, the Red Sox play at 11 am, and the bars are all filled by noon – is more commonly referred to as Marathon Day. Since this is not a running blog, let’s celebrate this special day the Screengrab way – with a look at the longest movies of all time!
According to our old friend Wikipedia, who would never lie to us about a matter of such importance, the three longest movies ever are all experimental films. In the number one slot, weighing in at a svelte 95 hours, is 2006’s Matrjoschka. Produced by German artist Karin Hoerler, Matrjoschka is described thusly at a site called Transform: “Matrjoschka plays with the possibilities of visual perception. It’s not possible to view the complete artwork. As well as we can’t see as a flower blossom out. Only we can note that the bud became a bloom. The cryptographic artwork Matrjoschka was shown at the outdoor LED-Screen of the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein building within the Luminale 2006 in Frankfurt/M., Germany. The sequences based on a private video. At the beginning you can see a young boy driving a bicycle, at the end there are only abstract ornaments.” So…doesn’t sound like there are any big musical numbers in that one.
In second place at a mere 87 hours is The Cure for Insomnia, which premiered at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois, showing continuously from January 31 to February 3, 1987. The movie “consisting of artist L. D. Groban reading his lengthy poem A Cure for Insomnia over the course of three and a half days, spliced with occasional clips from heavy metal and pornographic videos,” per Wikipedia. Some folks on the IMDb claim to have actually seen this one. Or maybe Gold Member was joking when he asked, “When is the sequel released?”
Third prize goes, as it should, to 1970’s The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World. Running 48 hours, the movie lives up to that title, consisting as it does solely of “outtakes, commercials, strips of undeveloped film, academy leader, and other filmic castoff material, creating a seemingly endless stream of newsreel and stock footage.” Surprisingly, the Criterion Collection has not yet announced plans to release this one in a deluxe 24-disc edition.
The movie often thought of as the world’s longest, Andy Warhol’s Empire, actually runs a paltry 8 hours and 5 minutes. It’s outdone by a number of titles, including the 27-hour Burning of the Red Lotus, a silent Chinese serial released in 18 feature-length installments between 1928 and 1931, the 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, which shouldn’t count because it was a television series, and the nine hour Holocaust documentary Shoah. If you’d like to spend your Marathon Day in the company of one of these behemoths, might we suggest Star Spangled to Death? J. Hoberman describes it as “the ultimate underground movie,” and it appears as though all six hours are available for viewing on Google Video. Hey, it beats running 26.2 miles, right?