Day spent in preparation for the December 31, 2020 showing of Ambiancé, a 720 hours long film

 

‘On December 31, 2020 the Swedish artist Anders Weberg will end his 20 plus years relation with the moving image as a means of creative expression. After more than 300 films he puts an end with the premiere of what will be a very long film.

‘Ambiancé is 720 hours long (30 days) and will be shown in its full length on a single occasion syncronised in all the continents of the world and then destroyed.

‘There will always be longer films and there is but this one will be the longest film made that doesn’t exist. A totally different thing. This will be Anders last film he will ever make.

‘Described as a tale where “space and time is intertwined into a surreal dream-like journey beyond places,”, the abstract non-linear film features a hundred performance artists on a beach in southern Sweden – and that’s about it. There are no cuts.’ — collaged

A M B I A N C É

 

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Stills

 

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Answers
from VICE

‘In the finished film there will be around 100 actors, dancers, and performers involved in different ways. Some of them are from my past productions in the past, but most of them are here just for this film. As of now, there isn’t a single line of dialogue in the film. Perhaps that will change, but there has not been the need to use dialogue yet to explain anything. It’s a visual medium I’m working with. I think dialogue in film is a bit overused. It’s like beats in music—these things aren’t always needed.

‘For me, the film is just one part of the project. The creation and destruction has the same value in it. I think it was around 2002, when my oldest son was ten and he started to use the computer more frequently, I saw a change in how the young ones treated all different kind of media. Music, films, and games were sped up, downloaded, deleted without any emotions attached to it. With this film, I’m inverting and transforming that.

‘The film will start on December 31, 2020, in the different time zones. After it’s screened, I’ll travel to all the locations and physically destroy the medium used to show it. I consider it part of the performance to make sure all the originals are deleted. Then I’m going to have a glass of wine.’ — Anders Weberg

 

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Trailers

7 hours 20 minutes long trailer

Excerpt from hour 431 of 720

1 minute trailer

7.2 seconds teaser

 

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Interview

 

How do you even go about working on a film that is to be 720 hours long? Do you work with a set idea, a script, or allow the idea to evolve, given the length of the film?

– I do have a general idea, mood and feel for the whole piece at this moment which I follow but since I work with emotions and not a scripted, dramaturgical piece this changes a lot and will in the upcoming years.

My process is that I collect glimpses of light with camera and take that with me into the computer where the real work begins taking all this glimpses and arranging and rearranging them into a flow that I feel represent the emotion I try to express. There is a Lot of post production behind it where I run all the captured material true numerous processes. I use After affects for that part.

Right now I have finished 400 hours of finished film so I am in a good position. I have to completely finish at least 1 hour of edited film each week to make my goal for now. That means I need 7-8 hours of raw material each week.

There is a lot of postproduction to get the look that I’m after. In a recent magazine article they calculated the following numbers of hours I need to finish it if I follow my current pace.

5760 hours of shooting (240 days)
8640 hours of post production (360 days)
Total: 14400 hours (600 days)

Why 720 hours? Why that particular duration of time and no other?

– The number 7 I knew when I started thinking about this 10 years ago since it’s such a strong number in history, myths and religion. Some easy ones. Lucky number seven, seven days of the week, seven deadly sins, seven colors of the rainbow, seven notes to the diatonic scale. The examples goes on and on.

720 has followed me for me along time since it’s the resolution for pal video and that it makes 30 days if you go 24 hours per day. I think 30 days is the biggest reason. 720 is also interesting mathematically since it’s a Harshad number and also if you take 1x2x3x4x5x6 = 720

When you say the film will be released in 2020 and will run for 30 days, what do you think it will do to the film-watching experience for the audience? Are you hoping that people will sit through it all (which seems physically impossible), or is the experience of watching this film all about experiencing it in bits and pieces, so that even the watching becomes ephemeral?

– It is as you say physically impossible to watch the whole film. The longest time someone spent watching film is ..

”The longest time spent watching films is 120 hr 23 min and was achieved by Ashish Sharma (India) at the KDDC Movie Theater, K.D Dental College, Mathura, India, from 11-16 June 2008. Ashish watched 48 films in their entirety taking rest breaks in between each film of no more than 10 minutes, as stipulated in the guidelines. ”

BUT .. I will be the only one who ever watched all the frames in this since I made it but Impossible to watch for 30 days. But that I feel is so beautiful. So this will be for sure an ephemeral experience and the only thing that will remain is the memories of the little bits and parts the viewer got to see.

How much of your past experience as an artist is feeding into this project?

– Every little part of me is in this movie. This will be my last after working full-time for almost 20 years so it better be. If not, what a waste.

There is an inherent irony to this film that will be destroyed after its first screening. The fact that the product is gone, but its legacy lives on. Was that intention deliberate? Because, in a way, it is a reflection of death too. That the physicality of the body is gone, but the spirit, the memories live on.

– Yes that is the main idea behind the whole project. Also another irony is that a lot of people and media has gotten stuck in the term ”the longest film” and are interested just in any kind of record and think that’s what I aim for but for me its a play with this record thing. Since it will be screened only one time and then destroyed this will be the longest film made that doesn’t exist.

You say it’s ”a sort of memoir movie” : what do you mean exactly ? Is it a series of images, memories, without any link ?

– I know that everyone has a story to tell even if they think they are not important and exiting but who says everything has to be so special. Basically it’s a memoir film, biographical film filled with all the memories I have so far in life. The places I’ve been, people I met, my dreams, hope and so on. Everything in the film is linked not chronologic but more emotionally.

You also say it will be shown only once, and then destroyed. Why ? Don’t you find it frustrating to work so many years on a project and then show it just once ?

– The idea behind the extinction of the film is something I also have thought a lot about and done many times before.

We live in a digital world where everything is kept forever as long as we have any media to store it on.

It’s very easy to create in a digital world. It’s harder to delete.

In the analogue world when something is broken or burnt for example is gone forever and cannot be brought back. In another project I started in 2006 I was also deleting works.

“P2P Art. Art made for – and only available on – the peer to peer networks. The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it. After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. ”There’s no original”. Six films with a duration between 45 minutes and 12 hours was uploaded on the file sharing networks in one copy and their original was deleted. P2P Art — The aesthetics of ephemerality.”

For Ambiancé it will be ultimate personal performance. And also to make a real end to my time with film. Screen it one in it’s full length and make sure very little bit of will be destroyed. I will travel to all the continents and destroy the player myself to make sure it’s deleted. The only thing that will remain is the memory of it and for those who watched it the experience.

 

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Some earlier films by Anders Weberg

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Impressions [Technopolis] (2014)
‘Filmed with a mobile phone at Technopolis in Athens, Greece when I was there giving a presentation and screening the 72 minute teaser from Ambiancé at the Athens Video Art Festival. [impressions] is a series of snapshot films made when visiting places that I’ve never visited before.’ — AW

 

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Numb (2014)
‘In memory of my son André Weberg, 1992-2014’. — AW

 

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Nothingness / Eleven (2013)
‘The state of being nothing. Las Palmas, 2013/11/07. Mobile phone.’ — AW

 

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Into my Arms (2013)
‘Video and Sound.’ — AW

 

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Meaninglessness: Act Seven (2012)
‘Having no meaning or significance. Filmed with the iPad2.’ — AW

 

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Remorselessness (2011)
‘Loop.’ — AW

 

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Clouds (2011)
‘Music: Twice a man. Lyrics: Percy Byshe Shelley-Twice a man. Female Vocals: Karin My Andersson’ — AW

 

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Ängelholm (2010)
‘This video piece was commissioned by the city of Ängelholm, Sweden. A call out was made to the residents of the city where they interpreted their city through out the year 2010. They where encouraged to send still pictures and video material electronically. I was then sent the material and just based on their material I interpreted the city through their interpretations. The finished video piece was projected on the tourist office during the official new years celebration 2010.’ — AW

 

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MIRROR MIRROR (2009)
‘Collaboration Anders Weberg, Sweden and Alison Williams, South Africa.’ — AW

 

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DEJECTED (2008)
‘Sad and depressed; ORIGIN late Middle English (also in the sense [overthrow, abase, degrade] ): from Latin deject- “thrown down,” from the verb deicere, from de – “down” + jacere “to throw.” Oxford American Dictionary.’ — AW

 

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I bet he was there. Mat Grabowski. Post-hippie/biker look, handlebar mustache. ** Bernard, Hi, B. You paid wonderfully close attention to their poems! I’m honored, as would be they maybe. I’m especially happy that you pulled out that sentence by that escort who designed cellophane packaging for himself. It would have been rather tragic if such a good, grounded sentence had flown under the radar. Your 1) is fascinating. Your 2) rang my bell. All I’ve heard about ‘The Young Pope’ is that it has inspired a bunch of memes and that Jude Law found them amusing but didn’t know what a meme was until someone explained to him what a meme is. That’s literally all I know about it. That exhibition sounds cool. Wish I could see it. 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If it’s not important, then I would feel free to reinvent or distort the character as much as you want and need to make the film work the best it can. If viewers are meant to recognize who the character is based on, no matter what, you’re going to have viewers who spend some initial part of their brainpower parsing how much the actor looks like the real deal. I don’t think you can escape that. ** Lord_s, Lord! Cool, I’ll absolutely for sure watch it. Maybe it’s on French Netflix. I’ve been looking for a good reason to join French Netflix, and now I have one. Which is good. Thank you, sir. Oh, tacos. I want one. A vegetarian one. There’s a little place in Paris that has a good vegetarian one. The French have this horrble fondness for putting cactus in Mexican food. Even in the fucking rice and beans. But that one little place I mentioned doesn’t. 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The commenters on the escorts have been strangely witty of late. Yeah, I went through two major earthquakes in LA and a bunch of small ones. The first one happened when I was in high school, and I had a big, very heavy stereo speaker on a shelf above my bed, and it fell about a quarter of an inch from my sleeping head, which was good because it might have killed me. The second one was in the early 90s. It was intense. Buildings collapsed really near me. This old man who lived next door to me got killed by it. No, no snow, it’s so sad. My weekend was all right. Gisele gave me a great chocolate filled Pierre Herme gallette des rois as a late b’day present. Zac and I tried to go see movies but were foiled at every turn by screenings being sold out. But we had fun anyway. And work, and film stuff, and blah blah. It was good. Now it’s Monday already. How was yours? Love, me. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I feel that way about some of them too, but I also know from a lifetime of being friends and more than friends with guys sort of them that they are a big handful, so, all in all, I feel okay that they’re not potential friends. My birthday was okay, thank you. People still play SIMS? Huh. Boy, you’re too hard a worker. But it’s probably good, right? Long, long ago someone taught me an important lesson about escorts. If you think they’re cute or buyable or whatever except that there’s one of their photos where they look a lot less cute, that’s what they look like. It sounds like your generous Democrat friend lacks a moral compass. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! My pleasure about the escorts, of course. Well, that’s the thing. I think if you’re a young someone who wants to write, say, a novel, and if you think a novel is a thing with set rules and guidelines and so on that you need to learn in order to be able to write one, then studying writing at university is probably a really good thing because teaching students how to build plots and characters and narrative momentum and psychological developments and write classily and so on in the manner found acceptable by the literary establishment is what the vast majority of writing programs do. And it sure seems like most aspiring novelists want to learn to do that. But if you think of a novel as being just a particular area where you want to experiment and invent things that excite you, you can learn what a novel is and what it can be potentially by reading a bunch of them, both ones that are conventionally made and really wild ones. And that was my interest in novels. I never thought becoming a novelist was like becoming a soldier where you had to join the club the way aspiring soldiers have to join the military or something. Let’s stay weird, Dora. I kind of laid out my weekend to Montse. It was okay. I talked to my old high school friend again, and that was great. Zac and I tried to see a bunch of movies (Chantal Akerman, ‘Paterson’, a couple of others) and never ended up seeing anything, but we had fun anyway. Today we’re meeting with a guy who we think will be able to direct us to some possible actors for our film, so that could be cool. What did Monday offer you, and did you accept? ** Jamie, Hi, Jamiester! I did see it. Wait, I do see it. Right now at this very second. You were commenting on a train? That’s exciting. Maybe people comment here from trains all the time. I never ever do anything on my phone other than call or send text messages, so I never imagine people posting here or on Facebook or wherever from their phones. 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