This week Chicagoans have the chance to see not one, but two four-hour-long movies on the big screen. Hu Bo’s Chinese feature An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) is in the middle of a weeklong run at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Edward Yang’s masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) screens at Doc Films on Thursday at 5 PM. These works are superb—and very different—examples of what filmmakers can do with the four-hour running time. Hu’s film, which takes place over a single day, burrows into its milieu until the conflicts seem overwhelming. Yang’s film, on the other hand, uses its extended duration to create a panoramic sense of the setting and period in which the story takes place.
Doomed Love Manoel de Oliveira’s 265-minute adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco’s 19th-century romance contains virtually every word of the source novel, played out in perfect fidelity to the text (1978). The result is a striking, eccentric film that finds its meaning in the rupture between a 20th-century medium and an antique rhetoric, measuring the passage of time through the modulations of human thought. A wealthy young man falls in love with the daughter of a rival aristocratic family; kept apart by their parents, the two lovers communicate through long, impassioned letters. Oliveira constructs a temple of words against a deliberately stiff, theatrical mise-en-scène, yet for all its abstraction, the film is astonishingly immediate and moving, driven by a prickly obsessiveness and a swooning romanticism.—Dave Kehr
