SFF: 'exergue – on documenta 14'

Prior to this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the longest film I had ever seen in a cinema was Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, the Hungarian filmmaker’s seven-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, which I saw with my friend Dave at MoMA in New York City over the course of a single day in 2009. There were two intervals and I ate two hot dogs. The experience—of the film, I mean, not of the hot dogs—affected me, and I believe Dave, profoundly. (Sátántangó later became the visual basis for The Tyger, the webcomic I started with my ex-wife, Melanie, a couple of years later. Unfortunately, we never got further than the beginning of the second chapter. As it turns out, writing a webcomic is a lot easier than drawing one.)

Until recently, the longest film I’d ever seen, in the cinema or otherwise, was Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. I watched Lanzmann’s film, which is nine-and-a-half-hours long, on DVD over the course of a day, back when I was at film school. This was in the days before smart phones, so I more or less endured it as it was intended to be endured. It, too, is a masterpiece, and incidentally one of the scariest films ever made about trains.

But time—real time—passes. As of June, the longest film I have ever seen, in a cinema or otherwise, is exergue – on documenta 14 by the Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis. At fourteen hours and eight minutes long, it is the second longest non-experimental film ever made. Over three days, in five-to-six-hour blocks, myself and a steadily dwindling group of die-hards watched how a contemporary art show is put together, begins to wobble, collapses under its own weight, and is torpedoed by the press for its troubles. The film, if not the exhibition, was fantastic.

I have a prickly relationship with contemporary art. This is to say that I have a tendency to hate it. When I first moved to Melbourne in 2006, I actually had to leave a show at ACCA after beginning to hyperventilate in rage. (I can’t remember what caused this: the caravan that had been taken apart and had its pieces laid out on the floor, or the prefab bird feeders that had been purchased from IKEA, painted different primary colours, and installed upon a wall. I suspect it was the latter.)