By Dancin Dan
If you've heard one thing about Germany's Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Toni Erdmann, other than how great it is (and you can add me to the chorus of voices showering it with praise), it's probably been that Maren Ade's shaggy-dog comedy is LONG. So, trivia hound that I am, I was naturally curious to see just how long it was in the grand scheme of Oscar.
Toni Erdmann has either the 16th or 17th longest running time of all the films nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. That confusion comes from the weirdness of different versions of films and which ones the Academy actually saw when voting...
In some cases, it doesn't really matter, as with the foreign mini-series that were trimmed for theatrical release and are still significantly longer than most of the other nominees. The "problem film" here is Yugoslavia's The Battle of Neretva from 1975, which was 175 minutes long in original release, but was apparently trimmed by US distributors to 105 minutes. Which one of these versions was actually submitted to the Academy, I don't know.
But either way, AMPAS is clearly not averse to long sits, even if length itself doesn't guarantee anything. The longest film nominated has only won fifteen times, and if Toni Erdmann wins, it would be the third longest Best Foreign Language Film winner, behind the Soviet Union's mammoth War and Peace and Sweden's Fanny and Alexander. The twenty longest Foreign Film nominees are as follows:
4 hours plus
1. War and Peace (Soviet Union, 431 minutes originally, cut to 371 in the US)
2. The Deluge (Poland, 315 minutes)
3. Nights and Days (Poland, 251 minutes)
3 hours plus
4. The Brothers Karamazov (Soviet Union, 232 minutes)
5. Lagaan (India, 224 minutes)
6. The New Land (Sweden, 204 minutes)
7. The Emigrants (Sweden, 191 minutes)
8. The Dawns Here Are Quiet (Soviet Union, 188 minutes)
= Fanny and Alexander (Sweden, 188 minutes)
10. White Bim Black Ear (Soviet Union, 183 minutes)
11. Kwaidan (Japan, 182 minutes)
12. The Promised Land (Poland, 180 minutes)
two½ hours plus
13. Pharaoh (Poland, 175 minutes)
= Camille Claudel (France, 175 minutes)
= The Battle of Neretva (Yugoslavia, 175 minutes, cut to 105 minutes in the US)
16. Mother India (India, 172 minutes)
17. The Road a Year Long (Yugoslavia, 162 minutes)
= Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) (Japan, 162 minutes)
= Toni Erdmann (Germany, 162 minutes)
20. Indochine (France, 159 minutes)
= 12 (Russia, 159 minutes)
As you might have noticed, the Soviet Union tends to have long nominees. On average, their nominees are the longest of any country: The average length of a nominated film from the Soviet Union is just over 185 minutes long. However, if you combine the Soviet Union's nominated films with those of the current Russia, that average drops to almost 145 minutes, putting it behind India, whose nominated films have an average length of almost 170 minutes, and just ahead of third place Poland (144.5 minute average).
Interestingly enough, Toni Erdmann is an outlier in this top twenty in a pretty significant way: It's entirely contemporary in setting. Of the rest of them, the only ones not completely set in the past were: White Bim Black Ear, Mother India, and 12 (and possibly The Road a Year Long, which I can't find enough information on). All the rest were historical dramas, many adapted from a novel.
What's your favorite "long sit" among the Foreign Film nominees?