When is a movie no longer a movie? That would go into what cinema is for, and what purpose it serves. Is it to make boatloads of money for studios that are drastically underpaying their staff? Is it an escape from the realities of life? A form of propaganda? Or just a way to keep the masses entertained, if only for a little while?This is where the umbrella of experimental film comes in, avant-garde cinema that seeks to break away from mainstream conventions of the moving image. Whether it be by pushing the limits of what is acceptable to put on screen, such as manyfilms that have been banned throughout history, or seeing how far one can stray from the traditional budgetary means of making a movie,such as the films within the Dogme 95 movement. Experimental films attempt to capture the infinite beauty and awe, or sometimes horror, that the world has to offer or portray the inner world of a single artist.
Derek Jarman’sBluehas no other image but a screen of international Klein blue and yet effectively captures his struggle with AIDs that would eventually take his life.This Is Not A FilmbyJafar Panahiwas a film made illegally, but still shot on an iPhone and smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival in a birthday cake. Though people may scoff that films like these are pretentious or trying too hard, film is an art, and art must have experimentation with what stories can be told, which methods a filmmaker can use to present the story, and how long that story can be.
This brings us toAmbiancé,directed by Swedish artistAnders Webergwhich was set to come out in 2020 but never had an official release. All we have of this film now is a 72-minute teaser trailer and a seven-hour and 20-minute official trailer. Now, I know what you’re thinking: That’s a movie. That’s a movie and a limited series. HBO has released content shorter than that, and few of us have the time to watch that, let alone in one sitting. How is that “all we have?”
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‘Ambiancé’ Was Meant to be 720 Hours Long
Well, those eight or so hours are but a mere fraction of what the project in its entirety would have been, because Weberg’s Ambiancé was set to be 720 hours long, for those of us who are bad at math, that’s 30 days. It’sthe second-longest movie to the 2012 filmLogistics,which clocks in at a whopping 857 hours. A whole month’s worth of movies. Back in 2020, many of us likely had the time to watch a film of that length, it’s not as if we had anything else going on, after all. A lot of questions still arise from this: How do you fill that kind of time on the screen? Why would someone do this? And how? Is this just a case of someone seeing whether they could without considering whether they should?
Some of these questions have thankfully been answered by Weberg, but others will remain a mystery.Ambiancéwas never given a proper release. Theatrically, it would be impossible of course, to roll a film in a cinema for a month, let alone in 2020. We also never got the projected 72-hour trailer in 2018. Weberg would end up retiring from the film industry, vanishing from public life, and taking his film with him.
Why Did ‘Ambiancé’ Never Get Released?
Weberg announced the project back in 2012, stating his intention to make a 720-hour film to be screened once in 2020 and then deleted, as a protest of film as preservation,essentially making a lost film of yore in the 21st century. The 72-minute teaser was released in 2014, with an unfortunate dedication to his son who passed away that year, but it gets removed after two weeks. In 2016, the 7-hour trailer is released, shot in one continuous take which is an impressive feat in itself. The hype starts to build around the ambitious undertaking, with people both buzzing and bemused at the idea of a 30-day film. But it was not meant to be. In 2018, Webergannounces that he is stepping away from filmmaking, citing a loss of passion. In 2021,he makes a vague post on Twitter, hinting that the film is finished, and that’s all, folks.
From what we can see of the film, it’s a collection of dreamlike snapshots.Weberg said in an interview with thelongestfilm.comthat he didn’t come into this movie with a script or story, just a feeling, ideas that he wanted to express inAmbiancé.It’s an exploration of film as an optical illusion, capturing moments and gluing it all together to make a whole. There are absolutely experimental documentaries that are similar to this, a look into the soul of the artist, or the beauty of the world, through a collection of “glimpses of light” as Weberg describes it.Ron Frickehas made several films that beautifully capture the same thing,Samsara, Baraka,andKoyaanisqatsiare all experimental documentaries with no consecutive storyline, as areMan With A Movie Camera, andSans Soleil.That’s the subgenre of poetic documentary,but none of these films are 720 hours long.
Is ‘Ambiancé’ a Gimmick or Peak Experimentation?
Is that truly what makes this film stand out, a month-long runtime and the fact that we can’t see it for ourselves? As it stands, we still don’t have the full film, so isAmbiancétruly nothing more than a gimmick now? A gag that a film would be a month long, that so much pomp and circumstance surrounded it for years, only for it to never come out. When you look at the Google Reviews for this movie, it takes a little bit to find one that’s actually serious, people describing outrageous scenes that may as well have happened, because it’s a tease to the internet, like a game of filmmaking chicken, three years out from the projected release and there’s still no word from Weberg, or is there?
Thelongestfilm.com is still active, and it’s a website with similar content to this one, and it seems that Weberg himself is an author on the site. But his Facebook page is gone, as is his website, and his Twitter has been inactive since last year. In February 2023, he released several blog posts, but the timeline of the movie remains the same. Did it release in 2020 after all, only to be destroyed immediately after? Or is the film still in production?Is it actually Weberg writing fun facts about Thor,or is he truly done with social media? And if the latter is still the case, what the hell is going on with this website?
