Set your calendars to 2020, when Anders Weberg’s 720-hour movie makes its one and only screen appearance.
I know, when you read “the world’s longest film” you probably thought of 1995’s Batman Forever, and, like me, you thought, “been there, done that.”
But no, we’re talking about Ambiance, an experimental film by Anders Weberg. He will finish by 2020. Go get in line now.
Anders Weberg is an artist from Sweden who is about halfway through his attempt to make the world’s longest film, a 720-hour free-floating memoir that will be screened only one time in its entirety, then destroyed.
720 hours is 30 days. That’s 30 days straight — morning, noon and night. No bathroom breaks, no off-time to check the IMDB about Weberg’s other credits (“I liked his earlier, 23-day films better”).
In July of this year, he released the first trailer on his Vimeo site. The trailer was 72 minutes long. But Weberg’s primary purpose isn’t to end up in the record books. His month-long movie is an extension of the “ambient filmmaking” he’s been doing for years.
Likewise, its destruction is an extension of his explorations into “the aesthetics of ephemerality” (as he puts it). Back in 2006, Weberg helped create Peer-to-peer art projects, in which an artist posts a video, someone copies it and alters it, and the original is destroyed.
Weberg admits that it will be physically impossible for anyone to see Ambiance all the way through. In fact, he’ll likely be the only person in the world to see all of it — as he edits footage, an hour a day, every day, from now until 2020.
He has a plan, however, to release more “trailers” before the film’s completion: a 7 hour one in 2016, and a 72 hour one in 2018.
You can get an idea of what Ambiance will be like by seeing glimpses on the film’s official site, or by watching other videos by Weberg on his official site. Such as this one, Numb:
N U M B by Anders Weberg [2014] from Anders Weberg on Vimeo.
Or even this recently released music video for the Alice Boman song, “Be Mine”:
And finally, here’s an interview with Anders Weberg from 2010, in which he discusses his ideas of art and ephemerality.