There's a long history of artists creating incredibly long films, and a Swedish filmmaker is planning to set an eminently unwatchable new record. Director Anders Weberg plans to make his upcoming picture Ambiancé run for 720 hours — 30 full days — with the picture exploring more or less what its title suggests: how film can evoke mood. It will be slow and strange, with little guarantee of a narrative, but that's hardly the point. Weberg plans for it to be a surreal exploration of his relationship with film.
Ambiancé will screen once and then be destroyed
A first trailer for Ambiancé was released on July 4th, and it'll be available online only until July 20th. Naturally, the trailer is quite long, running for 72 minutes. That's the last of the movie that you'll see for a while, though. A second trailer will follow in 2016, running for 7 hours and 20 minutes, and a third trailer will follow in 2018, running 72 hours. Finally, the film will be begin to play on December 31st, 2020, when it'll presumably take the title of world's longest film. The current record holder for longest movie is said to be the 2011 film Modern Times Forever, which runs for 10 days.
Like the trailer, Weberg plans for the movie to vanish too. Weberg plans to have Ambiancé screen only a single time, simultaneously on every single continent. After that, it'll be destroyed. For now, it's hard to see how the film's destruction fits into the movie — but then, these overlong films have often been more about our relationship with film than what the film shows. It's a technique that was arguably kicked off by Andy Warhol: his 1963 film Sleep depicted over five hours of a man sleeping, and his 1964 film Empire depicting the Empire State Building for eight hours.