Although the length of commercially distributed feature films has remained relatively standardized since the mid-1910s, there is also a small but substantial body of ambitious works that
utilize their extraordinarily long durations to give cinema the character of a religious ritual. While their methods and overall goals vary considerably, these works actively participate in a
modernist exploration of the relationship between form and content, often taking their innovations to what seem to be their limits, simultaneously establishing and exhausting their own
paradigms. Their makers strove to create cinematic cathedrals, monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. Unique both in their
formal adventurousness and their modes of presentation, works like Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927), Eniaios(Gregory Markopoulos, 1947-1992), Out 1 (Jacques Rivette,
1971), andHistoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998) utilize their temporal scale to create a particularly intense form of spectatorial engagement that is wedded to or related
to a larger utopian program. Synthesizing their disparate influences into magisterial edifices, these projects treat cinema as a space in which the most ancient forms can be made radically new.
