The shortest movie ever made
The majority of movies are around the golden 90-minute mark. However, some filmmakers like to run well over that marker, with Martin Scorsese, in particular, being very fond of a long movie that stretches long beyond three hours. But, on the opposite end of the spectrum, indie filmmakers such as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and Andrea Arnold got their big break after a string of quick, low-budget projects.
But there are short movies, and then there are really short movies, with a group of researchers in Hamburg, Germany, making the briefest film of all time back in January 2011. Having to divert their focus away from mainstream filmmaking made through a conventional movie camera, the researchers used a laser to make their tiny project that exists only on a molecular level, and we’re not talking about the fantasy of Marvel’s Quantum Realm either.
The laser in question was the FLASH X-ray laser, with the researchers using ultra-fast X-ray pulses to make their molecular movie. The result of their efforts was a film that lasted just 0.00000000000005 seconds, or 50 femtoseconds, and was a micro-model of the Brandenburg Gate that was made up of just two frames. Indeed, if you wanted to watch the film, you would have watched the movie without ever realising you’d seen it at all.
The film in question stands in exact contrast to the longest movie ever made, The Cure for Insomnia. Clocking in at 5,220 minutes, which equates to either 87 hours or three days and 15 hours. The largely inaccessible movie doesn’t contain a plot at all. Rather, it is a film of the artist L.D. Groban reading a poem that shares the same name as the movie by director John Henry Timmis IV.
It’s fair to say that you could watch the movie made by the FLASH X-ray laser trillions of times over before The Cure for Insomnia was finished, saving you hours in the process.
Whilst long movies are often criticised, there are plenty that are worth watching, including a number of films by the master Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. His 1994 masterpiece Sátántangó is over seven hours long and tells the story of a small community whose lives are altered by the arrival of a long-forgotten individual.
Take a look at how the process of molecular filmmaking works using the FLASH X-ray laser and its complex scientific procedure below.
