By Martin Keady · June 29, 2023
The question, “What is the longest movie ever made?”, is as difficult, if not impossible, to answer definitively as, “What was the first movie ever made?”. It depends on how you define a “movie:” whether it is just a continuous piece of film that records actual (or even experimental) events, regardless of structure or form; or whether it has a narrative (or something resembling a narrative) and so is more recognizable as an actual “movie” as most people would understand the term, namely a story told through moving pictures.
Nevertheless, as the resident film historian here at The Script Lab, I have attempted to answer the question, first considering the longest films ever made purely by length; then considering the longest actual movies (films with a plot) ever made; and then the question of what are the longest great films ever made. Finally, we suggest an answer that is not a film at all but a television series, showing how in the 21st century the traditional divides between film, television and all other forms of screen storytelling have almost completely collapsed.
It says everything about the difficulty of saying what the longest movie ever is that there is no absolutely definitive answer, even when the only attribute being measured is length.
The Guinness Book of World Records (and its online equivalent), which for so much of the 20th century was regarded as the best way of answering such questions, says that it is the perfectly named The Cure For Insomnia (1987), which was directed by John Henry Timmis IV. (The longstanding joke is that the previous three John Henry Timmis-es began the film and the fourth one finished it).
According to Guinness, The Cure For Insomnia runs for an astonishing 85 hours, or three days and 13 hours. It has no plot and consists of a poet, L.D. Groban, reading his poem of the same name, which is over 4,000 pages long, with the only occasional interruptions coming in the even more bizarre form of clips from heavy metal or hard rock videos and pornographic films.
It says a lot about The Cure For Insomnia that there is not even agreement on how long it is, with Wikipedia listing it as being 87 hours long, strongly suggesting that no one (not even its director or nominal “star”) has ever been able to watch it all and time it precisely.
However, what is even more revealing about The Cure For Insomnia is where it was first shown. That was the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and that location is important because it shows that The Cure For Insomnia was never conceived of as a “movie” that would receive a commercial release (however limited) but as an artistic experiment or even art installation that was specifically designed to test the viewer’s stamina. In effect, as its title implies, it is not meant to be viewed in its entirety.
The Cure for Insomnia (1987)
Remarkably, there are even longer movies (or experimental films or art installations) than The Cure For Insomnia. Wikipedia lists the longest ever as another film with another perfect title (perhaps the only artistry in these uber-long films is in their titles), Logistics (2012), by Sweden’s Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson. Again, as its alternative title, Logistics Art Project, makes explicit, it is not really a movie but an art project or artistic experiment that is not meant to be seen in one viewing.
Logistics, as the title suggests, examines global logistics in the 21st century, following – in real-time – the construction, transportation and eventual sale of a quintessentially 21st-century device, a pedometer or step-counter. And with the typical quixoticity of the uber-long film, it does so in reverse chronological order, tracing the pedometer from its sale in Sweden all the way back to its manufacture in the city of Shenzhen in southern China.
Logistics or Logistics Art Project weighs in at a truly gargantuan 857 hours (or nearly 36 days), which is more than 10 times as long as The Cure For Insomnia. And what is truly incredible is that the pandemic-caused disruption of global supply chains, which we are still experiencing and which is a key driver of global inflation, means that if it were filmed today, more than a decade on from its actual filming, it would last even longer.
The second category of “longest movies ever made” to consider is those filmic works that have a plot or storyline, whether they are fiction or documentaries, and so more closely conform to the usually understood idea of a film or movie, rather than being explicitly artistic experiments that are not really designed to be viewed in full. And it is precisely because these films are designed to be viewed in their entirety, unlike their more overtly artistic counterparts, that they are significantly shorter in length.
In this category, the “winner” is also supremely well titled: Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (We Will Make A Film, which is also called The Innocence in some markets) (2019), although We Will Make The Longest Film Ever Made might have been even better. It is a black-and-white Bangladeshi film based on the events of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, including its aftermath, in which the Bengali nationalists of East Pakistan broke away from the rest of Pakistan.
The obvious joke is that the film, at 21 hours and five minutes, lasts nearly as long as the war itself, or at least seems to. That is obviously not true, as the war lasted for over eight months, claiming 300,000 lives and displacing at least 10 million people. What is undeniable, though, is that Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (We Will Make A Film) is qualitatively different from the likes of Logistics or The Cure For Insomnia, in that it is not merely an artistic experiment or recording of actual events but a film or movie with all that that implies: identifiable characters and plot developments, including even dream sequences. If it is unlikely ever to be consumed, as it were, in one go, it is still a film that meets the common definition of the term and one that tells a remarkable story that is little known outside of Bangladesh.
Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (2019)
Among the other longest cinematic or actual movie-like films ever made are Resan (The Journey) (1987), a documentary by English director Peter Watkins that was filmed around the world between 1983 and 1985, or at the height of the Cold War (or the original Cold War, as it should probably now be called). Given the period in which it was made, it is fittingly focused on arguably the single most important issue at the end of the 20th century, which has terrifyingly returned over the last year with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, namely nuclear war and ordinary human beings’ fear of it.
In comparison with Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (We Will Make A Film), Resan (The Journey) lasts a relatively modest 14 hours and 33 minutes. However, in its detailed documentation of ordinary people’s fears about nuclear destruction, it is the perfect companion piece to the documentation of one particular, non-nuclear war that Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (We Will Make A Film) provides.
As almost all of us are discovering in the 21st century, the great age of democratic film-making in which virtually anyone can make a film of some kind on a smartphone, it is one thing to make a film but quite another to make a great film. And that is arguably even truer of exceptionally long films than it is of shorter ones. The Cure For Insomnia and Logistics may have kept the camera running for an inordinate amount of time, but it is questionable as to how much genuine movie-making (including, crucially, editing) was actually involved. Similarly, for all the undoubted merits of Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo (We Will Make A Film) and Resan (The Journey), it is unlikely that they would make any “Best Ever” list of films other than in the “Exceptionally Long” category (which is really a “Most Ever” list).
Here, then, are five truly great films that are exceptionally long but nonetheless extraordinary in every other way, too. They are listed in order of length, or running time.
Directed by Claude Lanzmann (9 hours, 26 minutes)
Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s epic yet simultaneously painfully intimate film about the Holocaust (“Shoah” is the Hebrew word for that most awful of historical events) is almost certainly the greatest documentary film ever made. Such high praise was proclaimed by luminaries like Marcel Ophuls, who was himself a great documentary maker (especially in The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which examined the collaboration between Vichy France and the Nazis) and Simone de Beauvoir, the great French feminist writer who lived through the Nazi occupation of France.
In interviewing both survivors and – extraordinarily – perpetrators of the Holocaust, Lanzmann produced a unique and uniquely verifiable record of the Nazis’ so-called “Final Solution,” which should be required viewing for all contemporary Holocaust deniers.
Directed by Béla Tarr; Screenplay by Tarr and László Krasznahorkai, based on Krasznahorkai’s novel of the same name (7 hours, 19 minutes)
If Shoah is the greatest film about the Holocaust, and by extension Nazism, then the Hungarian film Sátántangó (which means, in both Hungarian and English, “Satan’s Tango” or “A Dance With The Devil”) is the greatest film about the other 20th-century ideology that ended up killing millions of people, namely Communism. (A 21st-century equivalent of either film would surely concentrate on Capitalism and how it is contributing to environmental destruction and thus the potential extermination of our entire species.)
Examining the events in a Hungarian village after the collapse of a Stalinist collective farm, Sátántangó uses the village and its inhabitants as a microcosm of global communism, showing how the very best intentions of humanity (especially the nominal sharing of wealth) can have the very worst consequences.
Directed by Sergey Bondarchuk; Written by Bondarchuk and Vasily Solovyov, based on the novel of the same name by Tolstoy (6 hours, 55 minutes)
It is fitting that Napoleon is the subject of two of the films on this short list because everything about him was epic. The diminutive French general and military genius ranks alongside Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan as one of the greatest conquerors in human history (with all that that title implies for good and ill). Sergey Bondarchuk, who remarkably also starred in War and Peace as its main character Pierre, wrote and directed arguably the greatest Russian epic film and the one that remains the finest screen version of Tolstoy’s famous novel, notwithstanding the many pleasures of King Vidor’s much shorter Hollywood film of 1956.
Written and directed by Abel Gance (5 hours, 32 minutes)
Abel Gance’s Napoléon is arguably the greatest silent film ever made and certainly the greatest long silent film ever made. Of course, Napoléon was literally the high point of silent film, because, in the same year that it was released in France, The Jazz Singer was released on the other side of the Atlantic, finally making sound cinema possible. According to Norma Desmond (herself a silent movie star, albeit a fictional one) in Sunset Boulevard, it condemned all future cinemagoers to “Talk, talk, talk!”
Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman (5 hours, 14 minutes)
The last masterpiece of Ingmar Bergman, one of the very greatest film directors ever, was Fanny and Alexander, an epic drama about a Swedish family and in particular the titular siblings at the start of the 20th century. Originally made as a television miniseries (Bergman worked in film, television and theater throughout his career), it was eventually released cinematically and duly became one of the most celebrated winners of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
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Because it was originally made for TV, Fanny and Alexander exemplifies how the supposed barriers between film and television have long since blurred or even disappeared. And in the time since its release, that process has only been accelerated by two major factors: first, the development of the internet, which has truly made all the world a screen; and, secondly, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has hastened the transition from films generally being shown in public on large screens to generally being shown in private on smaller screens. Consequently, in time there may be no formal division at all between film, television and the internet, as they are all just different forms of screen storytelling.
As a result, it may eventually be recognized that the greatest screen stories ever told are not one of the aforementioned cinematic epics but epic cinematic television, like David Simon’s The Wire, one of the greatest television series ever made and arguably one of the greatest stories ever told on any screen.
At approximately 60 hours in total (roughly one hour for each episode), it has set the gold standard for long screen stories in any medium. Eventually, perhaps, other writers will rise to the challenge that it has set, by attempting to write similarly epic screen stories that repay the viewer’s commitment with a tale whose extraordinary scope is such that it can only be told over an extremely long period of time.
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