11 Longest Most Meaningless Movies in the World

Modern American blockbusters may feel longer and longer each year, but they’ve got nothing on the 11 longest most meaningless movies in the world. When a major movie is bad or just boring, it feels like it lasts forever, but these movies almost really do last forever, topping out at 10 or more hours. Compared with these films, the longest Hollywood films ever made are trifling. And unlike significant films like the masterful Holocaust documentary Shoah, these experimental films try to make an obtuse statement about, well, we’re not sure. But it takes a very long time. This list gets its title from The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World, a project made in England in the 1960s with the goal to become the longest film ever made. It dethroned Andy Warhol’s similarly pointless experimental film Four Stars by running nearly twice its length.

Artists who make the kinds of experimental films that are on this list could have lofty ambitions besides to just use up all the leftover film in the university’s filmmaking club. (But if your budget is about to run out and you’ll “use it or lose it,” there could be worse ways.) Humans have always liked to make art that tries to be controversial, and time periods with a lot of very realistic, coherent art are often followed by a backlash of difficult, provocative art. Think Pablo Picasso’s Guernica compared with his own prosaic early works. In the same year as The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World, the Beatles released their long experimental track “Revolution 9,” eight minutes of repetitive layered noises. But The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World is about 24 times longer than the average movie. If the average Beatles track is three minutes long, Revolution 9 would need to be 72 minutes long — nine times longer than it already is! — to be as proportionally long as the film.

No offense to Beatles fans who don’t believe Revolution 9 is meaningless. But what does that term imply, about a song or film or any other meaningless thing? It’s a slippery slope to say any work of art is meaningless, but some works are so hard to understand or draw conclusions about that they aren’t worth the viewer’s time. Certainly a movie lasting 48 hours isn’t meant to be watched in the way we watch the usual narrative film, meaning a story told in a clear way with a structure we recognize and relate to. Most of the 11 longest most meaningless movies in the world don’t have plots, characters, or stories in the traditional sense. They lack elements like the 16 most hated characters and villains in movies ever. It’s hard to find the rhyme or reason in these experimental films. They exist to be thought about as works of art, not watched in a theater.

The very earliest films were short. Film was very expensive and the technology was so new that there was a business war over which way people would even want to watch movies at all. Thomas Edison made his own best guess that people would want to watch movies by bending over to look into a one-person private theater. Even in Edison’s time, the turn of the 20th century, film was experimental in the most literal way because filmmakers weren’t sure what people would end up wanting to watch or pay for. Manufacturers made film better and cheaper and easier to produce, and eventually, everybody settled on the film reels we still use. Today, filmmakers use digital storage and recording video costs almost nothing besides time and labor. These tedious experimental films aren’t among the 16 most profitable movies based on return on investment, but they aren’t white elephants either.

Edison’s short films were fed in one continuous loop around a bunch of pulleys inside his individual viewers, and that was for films that topped out at a minute or two. Imagine if a 48-hour film had to be fed in one piece around thousands of pulleys. A 35-millimeter film reel is about 11 minutes of the final movie, so 48 hours is about 262 reels of 1,000 feet each. That’s nearly 50 miles of film! The whole list of 11 longest most meaningless movies in the world could circle the Earth — not really, but you could make it from Chicago to Los Angeles, Berlin to Cairo, Tokyo to Hong Kong, or Lisbon to Warsaw.

11. Happy

1,440 minutes (25 miles of film)

Three films on the list are tied at 24 hours long, so Happy is ranked lowest in the longest most meaningless movies in the world because it’s the least meaningless of the three. Pharrell Williams’s contagious song “Happy” was made for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack but quickly grew a life of its own because of Williams’s 24-hour music video. At the website for Happy, hundreds of people starred in individual takes on the song, dancing through streets, bowling alleys, and TV studios (thanks, Jimmy Kimmel). Visitors to the site were matched with a clock that corresponded to the time of day when each segment was filmed. Yes, this was all a lot of work, but what did it mean, besides a fun and sunny pop song?

10. The Clock

1,440 minutes (25 miles of film)

Second from the bottom on our list of longest most meaningless movies in the world is The Clock. Artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film is meaningful as art but still not much of a film for film’s sake. Marclay spent years finding and cutting clips from narrative film scenes that had clocks in them. As in Happy, the film lines up with a complete 24-hour real cycle of time. The film was made to repeat in galleries and Marclay auctioned several copies, signifying how important it was as a work of video art. But no one plans to sit and watch that entire 24 hours.

9. 24-Hour Psycho

1,440 minutes (25 miles of film)

Number 9 on our list of longest most meaningless movies in the world is 24-Hour Psycho. Artist Douglas Gordon took Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho and slowed it down so it runs exactly 24 hours. This is one of the more popular and accessible (relatively?) experimental films of this nature. Gordon showed it in 1993, and the film forms a major part of the plot of postmodern novelist Don DeLillo’s 2010 novella Point Omega, which is just 110 pages long — almost the same number of minutes as Psycho. Maybe someday, an artist will turn DeLillo’s book into a version of itself that’s 1,440 pages long instead. Then the snake will eat its own tale and a planet will crash into the Earth like in Lars von Trier’s 2008 film Melancholia. But really, let’s never find out.

8. Four Stars

1,500 minutes (26 miles of film)

Made in 1967, Andy Warhol’s experimental film is one of the oldest of the 11 longest most meaningless movies in the world, predating any kind of digital storage that has enabled the extremely long meaningless films of the new millennium. Like most of Warhol’s work in general, this film involves his famous arty friends and not much else. Two projectors showed different images layered on top of each other, too, and not in a fun 3D-glasses or stereoscope way. It all makes Warhol’s first film, Sleep, at “just” five and a half hours, sound like a real party.

7. The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World

2,880 minutes (50 miles of film)

Perhaps the best known experimental film outside of the art world, The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World is 48 hours of basically the cut-off crusts of a film sandwich: extra footage, countdown film introductions, collaged commercials, outtakes from other projects, and audio clips. It’s not meant as art or any kind of statement unless dadaist nonsense is a statement, but even that’s a bit lofty for these so-called filmmakers. The title really says it all.

6. The Cure for Insomnia

5,220 minutes (90 miles of film)

Video artist John Henry Timmis IV filmed his colleague, outsider artist Lee Groban, reading a four-thousand-page poem called “The Cure for Insomnia” in 1987. In the years since the filming, Groban continued to expand the poem until, by his death in 2011, it had reached 5,000 pages. Timmis himself was a local punk icon who always liked to record video along with his music — his legacy is mostly musical, besides his record-breaking entry in the 11 longest most meaningless movies in the world.

5. Matrjoschka

5,700 minutes (98 miles of film)

Matrjoschka is number 5 on our list of the longest most meaningless movies in the world. German artist Karin Hoerler created this epic piece of glitch art in 2006 using a single photo that she manipulated and distorted over a huge length of time. Glitch art is an intentional distortion of digital files by either tinkering with the data or altering the hardware that processes the data. The film was shown outdoors on an enormous LED screen with nightly breaks. Hoerler describes herself as a cryptographic artist and the visual noise in her work as an encoded visual message. The title Matrjoschka, meaning nesting doll, might refer to this layered revealing of her intention.

4. Untitled #125

7,200 minutes (124 miles of film)

Artist Josh Azzarella released this 120-hour-long film in 2011. In Untitled, Azzarella loops one entire scene from the movie The Wizard of Oz, and Azzarella claims he figured out that Dorothy’s time in Oz lasts 120 hours — 5 days exactly — so his film is stretched to that length. It’s not clear why the artist picked just one scene instead of distending the entire movie unless it’s a matter of copyright and intellectual property. The key word for fair use like Azzarella’s is “transformative,” meaning a new work based on an existing work is completely distinguishable and different from its source material.

3. Beijing 2003

9,000 minutes (155 miles of film)

Beijing 2003 is number 3 on our list of the longest most meaningless movies in the world. Controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei began his documentary career with this 150-hour work, in which a camera simply travels along and records all the roads in a particular area of Beijing. China’s northern capital city is encircled by concentric ring roads that began centuries ago with the construction of a protective wall around the city, similar to many other Asian and European cities from the same time. As cities overflowed their original walls, new walls were built outside the old ones. Ai traveled Beijing’s fourth ring road and filmed the area it enclosed. Later in his career, he made films about the other ring roads.

2. Modern Times Forever

14,400 minutes (248 miles of film)

Modern Times Forever is number 2 on our list, almost topping the longest most meaningless movies in the world. A group of Danish artists used a Finnish building for this 2011 film. Helsinki’s annual contemporary art festival commissioned the film, a tongue-in-cheek depiction of how a major Finnish company’s headquarters building in Helsinki will deteriorate over the millennia to come. Stora Enso, a paper and packaging company with roots in a mining company over 700 years old, is an emblem of Finnish heritage and industry. The film depicting the building’s decay over time was projected onto the building itself for an extra shot of absurdity.

1. Logistics

51,420 minutes (885 miles of film)