There are stories that can’t be told quickly. Despite the relative rarity of films longer than 3 hours, there are enough masterpieces in the history of cinema to make this list several times longer. Here are just 10 of them.
Sometimes a compact 90-minute film isn’t enough. There are stories that cannot be told quickly. Although the average length of films seems to be increasing, films longer than three hours are still unusual. They require an extreme level of engagement from the viewer, as well as a special level of attention (although why are we scared of a long film, but able to watch a new season of a TV series in volley?).
Despite their relative rarity, there are enough masterpieces in the history of cinema that would make this list several times larger. Here are just ten of them:
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982, 5 hours 22 minutes/3 hours 9 minutes)
“Fanny and Alexander” shows the story of the Ekdahl family’s life in early 20th century Sweden and the tragedy of the death of Fanny and Alexander’s father, Oskar. The carefully built family nest is destroyed when the children and their mother are forced to move to live with a local priest.
The film could have concentrated on the title characters and the difficulties of the children growing up, but Bergman devotes a whopping 5 hours of the film (or just over 3 if you watch the theatrical version) to showing and getting to know all the family members with their particularities and oddities.
The opening Christmas scene, which takes up the first quarter of the film, masterfully introduces each member of the family as well as a few characters who don’t belong there. Each interaction between the Ekdals, family friends and servants builds up a complex story that spans decades, long before the camera is turned on. It all seems to have been alive before the film began.
“Fanny and Alexander” is just a fragment of the larger canvas of the Ekdahl family, and Bergman’s genius lies in his ability to juggle so elegantly and beautifully with so many characters, each worthy of their own film. The warmth and love with which the Christmas episode is filled will seem like a sad and faded memory when the children face the daily torment of living with a priest, one of cinema’s most nefarious villains.
“Fanny and Alexander was to be Bergman’s last film, and it is one of the most remarkable works in this great man’s oeuvre.
A Bright Summer Day / Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian (Edward Yang, 1991, 3 hours 57 minutes)
The film, taking its title from the Elvis Presley song ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, is a coming-of-age story set in 1960s Taiwan and based on an authentic incident from the director’s childhood when a boy killed his classmate. In fact, the film’s original title translates literally as “the incident of the murder of a teenager on Gulin Street”.
“A Bright Summer’s Day – is a time bomb with a four-hour timer, but knowing when the countdown is over is irrelevant, as Yang creates more than just a story of growing up.
Through the experiences of Xiao Xir and a dozen other significant characters, A Bright Summer’s Day perfectly captures life at the time, resembling a novel in all its thoroughness and complexity. It is a film in which all the themes, narrative threads, relationships, motifs and characters are carefully crafted, impeccably crafted.
The children, complex, profound characters in themselves, work as ciphers with which to unravel the social and political problems of 1960s Taiwanese society (the Western title hints at the invasion of American culture, but this is only one of the themes explored in this rich canvas). Every scene, every conversation between the characters is filled with subtext, and it never feels moralistic or arrogant.
There is an aftertaste after all the films. After the credits, after the moment when darkness is replaced by light, when you disperse the fog and reality returns, you have to adjust to the fact that you are no longer in the film’s universe. Bad films are quickly forgotten. We immediately move on, hoping that the next film will be better. Movies like A Bright Summer’s Day stay with you forever.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975, 3 hours 21 minutes)
Chantal Akerman can make a 200-minute film composed entirely of long static plans of a woman (mesmerisingly played by Delphine Seyrig) engaged in a chore so that it captures more than many action films. And that speaks volumes about her talent.
Ackerman scrupulously observes Jeanne Dillman’s routine life and strange rituals. The effect is that Ackerman lulls the viewer into Jeanne’s closed world, synchronising our sense of time with her circadian rhythms, and when there appear, at first imperceptible, changes in her habits (slightly disheveled hair, slightly different cooking), we become creepy and anxious.
When enough time passes, Jeanne, sitting at the kitchen table, endlessly stirring hot chocolate, staring thoughtlessly into space, causes us deep concern. It seems like the end of the world has come when Jeanne drops a potato. Jeanne lives to be a servant of the patriarchy, and as the prison walls she has erected with such obsession begin to close in, she herself disintegrates into pieces.
Chantal Akerman uses every minute of her film to create one of the great feminist masterpieces. The women are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 2 hours 55 minutes)
Following the events of the life of the title character, the iconographer, Andrei Rublev is set in Russia, in the fifteenth century, during a turbulent and violent period in the country’s history. This film marked an important milestone in Tarkovsky’s career. The cinematic style which made him famous, and which originated in Ivan’s Childhood, blossomed in this three-hour time machine.
The film is a realistic portrayal of the past. Tarkovsky makes the mud, rain and earth seem almost tangible. “Andrei Rublev,” for all the problems with censorship, given all the scope of the plot and the three-hour span, seems almost miraculous, just like the sound of the bell at the end of the film. You can only be in awe of how something so great can be made at all.
Tarkovsky shoots with a level of skill that makes directors like Bergman proclaim the following: “Suddenly I find myself standing at the door to a room I never had the keys to before. It was a room I had always wanted to get into, and he was already mastering it freely and at ease”.
Satanic Tango / Sátántangó (Bela Tarr, 1994, 7 hours and 30 minutes)
The film is so long that you could have time to watch the other two films on this list instead. In Béla Tarr’s seven-hour magnum opus, The Satanic Tango, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, events unfold around a Hungarian village after the fall of communism.
The villagers receive money after a factory closes. Some of them plot to abscond with the entire sum, but their plans are disrupted by the news that a former villager, the charismatic Irimias, thought to be dead, is returning from the capital. His intentions are unclear.
The ’90s was something of a Renaissance for an ensemble film with multiple storylines (Pulp Fiction came out the same year as Tarr’s film, and there were also Boogie Nights, Short Stories, Magnolia, Exotica). The Satanic Tango also has a non-linear narrative, with character arcs intersecting and connecting in ways that constantly surprise over the course of seven hours.
A particular standout segment of the film is the one about the village drunk, known simply as The Doctor, who spends his days peeping at his neighbours and drinking. When the alcohol runs out, the Doctor embarks on his own odyssey in search of a refill. It’s mesmerising, partly because Tarr immediately slows down the pace.
Despite its seven-hour duration, The Satanic Tango offers the viewer an introductory challenge in the first ten minutes. If the long, uninterrupted plot of cows walking through a muddy village is too much for you, Tarr has saved you seven hours of misery. Turn this film off and watch the other two on the list. If you find yourself mesmerised, however, The Satanic Tango beats nothing else. Fasten your seatbelts.
Seven Samurai / Shichinin no Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954, 3 hours 27 minutes)
The plot could not be simpler: desperate farmers seek out seven samurai to help protect the village from an impending bandit attack. Kurosawa uses every second of the three-and-a-half-hour Seven Samurai to carefully reveal each ronin’s personality, their particular world view, motivations and what drives them. By the time of the battle itself, these characters seem like real people, and every time one of them comes within a hair’s breadth of death, your heart goes in your heels. Each death is devastating.
Every actor in the film is brilliant, but Seven Samurai belongs to Toshiro Mifune, who plays Kikuchiyo, the dark horse of the group, a real powder keg. “Seven Samurai” flies by like an instant, because the simple story is told with such visual expressiveness that the exposition at the beginning of the film is not perceived by the viewer as a heavy task: so much is told through the camerawork, especially the amazing placement of the actors in the frame, that the film can be understood even with the sound off. But certainly don’t do that, as Fumio Hayasaki’s soundtrack is one of the greatest of all time.
“Seven Samurai” works both as a spectacle for a lazy weekend when all one wants is an adventurous adventure, and as a thematically rich description of the class system. What makes Seven Samurai unforgettable is how contemporary it feels.
Perhaps because, with Seven Samurai, Kurosawa laid the foundations for modern action-adventure films: its DNA can be found in so many blockbusters that a return to it does not become as much of a leap in time as one might think, since Kurosawa essentially perfected the formula over 60 years ago.
Comedians / Ο Θίασος (Theo Angelopoulos, 1975, 3 hours 52 minutes)
“Theo Angelopoulos’ Comedians covers a key period in Greek history, between 1939 and 1954, in four hours of playtime: the death throes of the Metaxas dictatorship, World War II, the Nazi occupation, liberation, British and American intervention in Greek politics and the civil war between the “right” and the “left”. And all from the perspective of a itinerant group of actors.
Angelopoulos is one of the directors known for his long shots. He uses both static footage and the amazingly agile camera of the pre-Diecam era to create episodes that often last several minutes and bend time in a purely Angelopoulos fashion.
Individual panoramas, movement or camera turns can send the viewer and narrative years or even decades into the future or past, and it’s not always obvious when it happened. In the hands of a less masterful director, this could be a frustratingly difficult trick, but under Angelopoulos’ direction the effect is bewitching.
‘Comedians’ is one of the most interesting looks at imperialism in cinema history. It is particularly about the British and American presence in Greece and its impact on the country from the people’s point of view. It was a tumultuous period in Greek history, scattering people in different directions, forcing them to constantly adapt to change. And, as one of the actors in the itinerant troupe said at the end, people were just tired of it all.
Napoléon / Napoléon (Abel Gans, 1927, 5 hours and 13 minutes)
“Napoleon” shows the French leader’s early childhood (the bravura opening scene of a snowball fight showing Napoleon’s military and strategic genius), his escape from Corsica, the French Revolution and the invasion of Italy in the late 18th century. Hans had originally planned to make six more films, but was unable to find funding.
Hans uses immense length to build the legend of Napoleon using almost every cinematic technique (and inventing new ones along the way): rapid-fire editing, extra-large close-ups, subjective camera, underwater scenes, poly-screen, location shots, hand-held camera (one of the hand-held camera scenes anticipates Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line by several decades).
The film’s greatest legacy is the famous triple-screen triptych scene: an example of the widescreen format when it wasn’t even a word yet. To see it on the big screen is to witness one of the greatest spectacles in cinema history. Once seen, it’s impossible to forget.
When watching Abel Gans’ 90-year-old epic of over 5 hours, it feels like watching someone take a cinematic medium – still in its formative stages – and try to stretch it to the limit to see how far you can go. Hans takes full advantage of the possibilities of cinema. Sometimes they don’t quite work, and that’s when you start to feel those five hours, but when it works, it’s truly unforgettable.
Eureka / Yurîka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000, 3 hours and 37 minutes)
When a lone gunman attacks a bus, the three survivors – the driver and his brother and sister – must overcome the shock and try to find peace.
For a film that lasts over 200 minutes, Shinji Aoyama’s twenty-first century masterpiece does not seek to live up to expectations: in the first 20 minutes we are shown the attack, almost in list-of-facts format. We know nothing about the survivors (Makoto, Kozue and Naoki) before the incident – we are simply shown what became of them 2 years after one fateful summer event.
The gunman’s attack becomes a critical turning point in the lives of Makoto, Kozue and Naoki, though the world around them continues to be peaceful. The two children withdraw, barely uttering a word for most of the film: the true consequences of the event are only revealed towards the end.
As an adult, Makoto deals with family and friends who try to reintegrate him into society, but none of them can fully understand his condition. When Makoto confesses to a friend that he was a bus driver, she is at first fascinated by the legend surrounding the event, but then pauses.
“A lot of people died, didn’t they?” – she finally recalls. Time has dulled her senses about the human cost. But Makoto still can’t get rid of the pain. “Eureka” is a meditative exploration of the grief, sadness, guilt and rage that grips a person after a traumatic event.
Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1983, 3 hours and 49 minutes)
Based on the novel Bandits by Harry Grey, Once Upon a Time in America tells the life story of a group of gangsters, from growing up in Manhattan during the Prohibition era to maturity in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Leone’s directing in this sprawling four-hour epic is utterly masterful: smaller directors would have simply failed at trying to pull together something so ambitious. Throughout the film, his ability to create dynamic and visually flawless scenes never fails.
But what makes Once Upon a Time in America a truly great film is the acting of the two lead actors, Robert De Niro and James Woods. They both manage to turn disgusting personalities who do horrible things to other characters into, if not likable, at least compelling and (especially De Niro and his character nicknamed “Noodle”) pity-worthy characters when we see them already old men looking back on their lives with numerous “ifs and whys.”
Leone (and Morricone’s phenomenal soundtrack) fills Once Upon a Time in America with grief, longing and regret. Looking at the weary expression on De Niro’s face, all that time that has passed within the film flashes through your mind, and you wouldn’t get that effect if it were half as long.
It’s said that Sergio Leone was the first candidate to direct The Godfather in the 1970s, but he turned it down. Apparently, he had his own idea of what a Shakespearean mafia film should look like. If you refuse to direct The Godfather, things could have turned out much worse for you than making Once Upon a Time in America instead.