The Longest Movie of All Time Will Take You 35 Days to Watch (2024)

There is a great appeal to long and epic movies: one that flies in the face of the sensibilities of the modern theatergoing audience and relates a story of such grand proportions that the runtime is completely merited by the scope that the story covers. Cinematic history is full of examples of long and excellent films that push the runtime, but also tell such a compelling story that the audience doesn’t tend to mind. John Wick: Chapter 4 had a runtime of nearly three hours, for example, and is generally regarded as the best film in the series.

The theatrical cut of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was 3 hours 21 minutes and won Best Picture, and the history of Best Picture winners contains a fair number of these gargantuan films, from The Deer Hunter (183 minutes) to Gone with the Wind (238 minutes). Abel Gance’s 1927 film Napoleon is 5 hours 30 minutes long and widely considered a cinematic masterpiece. Despite the plaudits and runtimes of these films, though, there is one film that holds the undisputed crown as the longest film ever made. The 2012 Swedish documentary Logistics runs for 857 hours, which, for those of you keeping track at home, adds up to a runtime of 35 days (and 17 hours).

Logistics

TV-PG

The production cycle of a pedometer in reverse chronological order.

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Release Date

2012-00-00

Director

Daniel Andersson , Erika Magnusson

Runtime

51,420 minutes

Main Genre

Documentary

What Is ‘Logistics’ About?

The phenomenally long runtime of Logistics suggests, of course, a natural follow-up question: what topic merits a treatment the size of the longest movie ever made? And how do you schedule your bathroom breaks around watching it? How do you even keep your eyes open to watch it, other than resorting to using the Ludovico device from A Clockwork Orange?

The idea for the film apparently came about in 2008, when the Swedish filmmakers Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson read an article in a German newspaper on the manufacture of an electric toothbrush, the parts of which came from ten different countries. This sparked their interest and fascination with the sheer complexity of the global economy and interactions that bring all the modern gizmos into the hands of the public consumer.

This interest led to the central idea for what would become the movie Logistics, as Magnusson and Andersson decided to make a documentary following the production of one of these gadgets from beginning to end, from the moment of construction to the point at which someone bought it. It was meant to be an exploration of just how little the public actually knows about the world around them and how the things that are considered to be some of the most basic and accepted parts of everyday life in the modern world have a complex history and origin that few people ever consider, or what Andersson calls a “false sense of familiarity.”

The gadget of choice for the filmmakers was chosen specifically to be something that was a piece of “the sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of.” Consequently, it really could have been anything, but in this case, that bit of anonymous clutter turned out to be a pedometer. There the journey began, as the filming took the crew from Stockholm in Sweden to the port of Gothenburg, then on the world’s largest container ship from the port, across the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal (without getting stuck), then across the Indian Ocean to the port of Shenzhen and a factory in Bao´an, China.

Why Is ‘Logistics’ 857 Hours Long?

So far, the concept seems to be a worthy one for an intriguing documentary. However, answering the question of where modern gadgets come from doesn't seem to necessitate the runtime of the longest movie ever made (spoilers: it’s China). However, according to the Logistics Art Project, the point of the documentary was not merely to show audiences the long and complicated process by which the modern consumer accumulates clutter, but rather to remind them of an all too easily forgotten fact in a fast-paced and increasingly digital world: that this digital existence is entirely dependent upon slow, methodical, complex physical transport and distribution, and that there are no shortcuts on that journey.

As a result, the documentary takes no shortcuts in the process either. It films the entire journey from Stockholm to Bao´an in real-time. consequently, the runtime is an essential point of the film: it is an accurate representation of the amount of time that it takes for even the simplest and most pedestrian of objects to reach the hands of the public.

How ‘Logistics’ Became the Longest Movie of All Time

When you open up the field of competition to the realm of documentaries, the marathon for the title of “Longest Movie of All Time” becomes a bit more contested. Claude Lanzmann’s award-winning Holocaust documentary Shoah clocks in at 9 hours 26 minutes. The incorrectly titled The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World runs for 48 hours. The more aptly titled The Cure for Insomnia stretches the boundaries to 87 hours, but things are actually just getting warmed up. The documentary Beijing 2003 reaches the 150-hour mark. The movie Modern Times Forever is, comparatively speaking, a paltry 240 hours (or 10 days) long. But even so, none hold a candle to the runtime of Logistics.

All in all, Logisticsis a deliberately slow and methodical approach to the overlooked aspects of modern life. It immerses the audience in the long and drawn-out process of bringing even what people consider to be the most mundane of objects to the public while diving deep into the process that, for most people, is an invisible part of society. In a way, Logistics shows just how dependent people ultimately are on all of that overlooked process.