On the occasion of Agathe Snow’s 24-hour art film project Stamina, we got to thinking about other experimental films that go beyond the length of an average feature. Andy Warhol was a big lover of letting the camera just roll and roll, and Matthew Barney’s films can be long-winded. Below are a few of our favorites in the category in long art films.

1. The Clock (2010)

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour montage of film clips taken from the last 100 years of cinema. It features time-relevant subject matter, such as Roger Moore checking his watch in Moonraker, Michael J. Fox being woken up by an alarm clock in Back to the Future, and many stars being startled by the chirping of a cuckoo clock. These excerpts have been painstakingly edited together to form a film in real-time. A narrative unfolds in the madness, as Marclay bunches together similarly themed clips and introduces stories, cuts away and returns to them later. The project took the artist three years to assemble and is an incredibly powerful meditation on the enigma of time.

************************

2. River of Fundament (2014)

Matthew Barney refers to River of Fundament as “an American opera that is epic in proportion”. Loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel about Egyptian mysticism, Ancient Evenings, the film features Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paul Giamatti, Elaine Stritch, Ellen Burstyn, Joan La Barbara, and jazz percussionist Milford Graves and finds the artists working with text for the first time. The film clocks in at nearly six hours and usually screens with two 20 minute intermissions.

************************

3. 24 Hour Psycho (1993)

Created by Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho is an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames per second. That means the shower scene runs 9 minutes versus the 45 seconds in the regular film.

************************

4. Happy (2013)

Happy is the first 24-hour music video. It features Pharrell Williams’ song, from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. Shot by Jon Beattie, the video finds the 4-minute song repeated several times with various people dancing around Los Angeles and miming along. The video includes several cameos by the likes of Whit Hertford, Kelly Osbourne, Magic Johnson, Sérgio Mendes, Jimmy Kimmel, Odd Future, Steve Carell, Jamie Foxx and more. You can view it at http://24hoursofhappy.com/.

************************

5. Empire (1964)

No list of epic long art films is complete without Andy Warhol’s Empire. The 1964 silent black-and-white film comprises over eight hours of continuous slo-mo footage of the Empire State Building taken from late one evening until early the next morning. Warhol directed the film and Jonas Mekas served as the cinematographer.

************************

6. Star Spangled to Death (2004)

Ken Jacobs spent 50 years assembling Star Spangled to Death, a six and a half hour found-footage epic that critiques a stolen and sold-out America.

************************

7. The Movie Orgy (1968)

Directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace) and produced by Jon Davison, The Movie Orgy is a seven-hour documentary compiled from film clips, commercials, film trailers and other audio/visual randomness mostly from the ’50s and ’60s. Schlitz beer sponsored the film and toured it around to college campuses and repertory theaters.

************************

8. A Lot of Sorrow (2014)

A collaboration between Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and the band The National, A Lot of Sorrow is a six-hour video that finds the band performing their song “Sorrow” live on stage, repeatedly for six hours. Over the course of the film, the band members tire and make minor alterations to the song.