What's the Longest Film Ever Made?

You know the feeling. You thought the movie was going to be good, but it's bad — really bad, teeth-gnashingly, soul-deadeningly bad. Bad films seem endless, as each second of cinematic awfulness seems to last centuries. There are many films that seem really long, but which is the longest in real time?

The answer depends on exactly what you mean by film.

To most people, a film is a movie they see in a theater, usually starring one or more famous actors and lasting around an hour and a half. But there are many other types of films, from short films lasting only a few seconds to experimental art films lasting eight hours or more.

Such films were never intended for a theatrical release but instead created for the artists' own pleasure — or were meant to be staged in an art gallery where viewers are not expected to watch the entire film. Theater owners discourage long films for the simple reason that they can show fewer of them per day and therefore make less money on them during their run.

The longest film on record is an experimental documentary by Gerard Courant titled "Cinématon," which clocks in at a butt-numbing 152 hours, and takes nearly a week to watch in its entirety. It is a series of short segments featuring thousands of different people, filmed over three decades.

According to "The Movie List Book" (Betterway Books, 1994), some of the longest films released in U.S. theaters include "Gone With the Wind" (1939, 220 minutes); "The Seven Samurai" (1954, 200 minutes); and "The Ten Commandments" (1956, 220 minutes). (These are the original running times, and shorter versions were cut.) In today's world of short attention spans , it seems likely that the hours-long epics are probably gone for good.

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