Steve McQueen, four hours and 22 minutes. Wang Bing, three hours and 32 minutes. Scorsese, 3′26. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 3′17; Víctor Erice, 2′49, and so on, never better said, a long etcetera of films that do not fear the challenge of their extension and that covers all sections of the Cannes festival.
All this in a year in which the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa presents a nine-minute short film, The Daughters of Fire, and the Spanish Pedro Almodóvar a medium-length film, Strange Way of Life, of 30 minutes. The duration of the films is dynamited and for many this is a trend that will end up being imposed allowing films of all conditions to coexist in an official competition section, as it already happens in other festivals. In addition, it opens an important debate on the new challenges of film distribution, which increasingly faces films that go beyond conventional footage.
In Cannes they have already been able to see some of the longest and at the same time most remarkable films of its programming. One of the bravest decisions of the management team has been to include in the competition the latest film by Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, one of the most relevant figures of contemporary documentary, which in Youth (Spring) introduces us to the routine of the textile factories of the city of Zhili, a place 150 kilometers from Shanghai where the clothes consumed in the rest of the world come from. Observing closely the lives of the people who dress the planet provokes in the viewer an awareness that is only understood after facing their meticulous footage.
Still from 'Youth (Spring)', by Wang Bing.Gladys Glover, House on Fire, CS Productions, Arte France Cinéma, Les Films Fauves, Volya Films
Another example is the stunning Occupied City, out of competition, in which British filmmaker Steve McQueen chronicles the life of Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Without archival material, following the path that Claude Lanzmann opened with Shoah, McQueen films the past from the present while a voiceover unfolds an inventory of terrifying crimes to the rhythm of the current street map of the capital of the Netherlands. Here there are no direct testimonies, only imperceptible traces in a city where for years the Nazi terror nested. Each street hides a memory that the present seems obstinate in trampling and that McQueen pursues with his refined sense of image and sound and guided by the script of his wife, Bianca Stigter, director of the documentary gem Three Minutes and author of the book on which Occupied City is based.
Facing this type of film may seem exhausting, but its immersion causes the opposite, the incomparable sensation of breathing to the bottom and to the beat of the images.
This same year, a film like the Brazilian A longa viagem do ônibus amarelo, seven hours, about the six-month journey between Venice and Kathmandu aboard a Volkswagen convertible that in the 70s the filmmaker and writer Júlio Bressane undertook with his wife Rosa Dias and his friend Andrea Tonacci, has been one of the most celebrated in festivals such as Rotterdam and Bafici. As already happened with La flor, cult film by Argentine Mariano Llinás, 14 hours, which broke molds with its excess.
"Festivals, especially the smallest and most audacious, that is, those who have nothing to lose, among which is not Cannes, which in these things is in tow, have decided that the durations of the films are no longer a delimitation and an experimental piece of minutes is worth the same to extreme cases such as the three hours of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, the film by Vietnamese Tien An Pham included in the Directors' Fortnight", explains Álvaro Arroba, programmer in that section of Cannes, who recalls how the short film Mi última aventura, by Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas, was victorious in the 2021 edition of Bafici over the feature films that competed that year.
Excessive footage is, on the other hand, nothing new in cinema. In fact, its history is that of a mutilated art. From the nine hours of Greed, by the misunderstood visionary Eric Von Stroheim, to The Fourth Commandment, by Orson Welles, or The South, by Victor Erice, whose career has been marked by his struggle against the limits set by the production system.
What has changed in recent decades is, among other things, the laxity allowed by digital and the increasingly assumed contamination of the documentary genre in fiction, "although distinguishing between one and the other is at this point a tired and sterile debate," adds Arroba.
The most important question today is how distribution copes with longer and longer films. Unresolved questions but that are now on the table before the imminent premieres of films such as Trenque Lauquen, by Laura Citarella, at the Cine Estudio Bellas Artes in Madrid or Out 1, by Jacques Rivette, at the Filmoteca, where they plan to screen on June 17 the more than 13 hours of this milestone, Within the retrospective dedicated to the French filmmaker since last April. "It is the first time that the film can be seen in its entirety in Spain, and it is not easy," says Carlos Reviriego, deputy director and programming of Filmoteca Española. "Logistically it is very complicated, in fact there has never been a pass like this in the Doré. If we have managed to move forward it is thanks to the passion of our team, Natalia Marín and Pablo López, and the projectionist, Ignacio Estrada. Obviously it is a deficit session, framed within a non-profit cultural initiative. "
Due to its extreme conditions, the film, from 1971, has been screened very little, "although a figure like Éric Rohmer assured when he saw it that it was a kind of Holy Grail of cinematographic modernity". Already in the nineties, with all its post-production finished, it was screened in some festivals and in Paris, divided into eight episodes and four parts, as later happened in New York. "The Doré will be a historic session that will last all day. We will see how it is given to the bold who will dare with this extraordinary experience."
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