A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinematheque Française
Richard Roud
1983; Viking
A lovely biography about a man for whom every day was a film festival. Henri Langlois is the name most synonymous with the Paris Cinematheque. His decades-long reign earned him the respect of cinema historians and filmmakers alike. Perhaps Langlois is best revered by those who would be key figures in the French New Wave, as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, among others, would be inspired by the films that were programmed at the Cinematheque by Langlois, thusly influencing their own revisionist pictures.
Throughout his life, Langlois was tireless in rescuing old films and preserving them for posterity. Some films today exist solely because Langlois was in his time the rare person to realize that old movies had some kind of historical value. Richard Roud entertainingly details the practices of Langlois and his dedicated co-workers of archiving film materials. One particularly memorable moment features one of his helpers archiving some film cans in a cavern during the German occupation. For fear of being discovered, and that the nitrate film stock was highly explosive, she couldn’t even use a candle for illumination. She had to archive them all in near dark! As much as Langlois was a dedicated historian, his unconventional working methods easily rubbed people the wrong way. Most famously, he continued to screen of dangerous nitrate prints once celluloid was more common, because he insisted that the pictoral quality of nitrate was far superior to that of the newer, safer stock.
Although Richard Roud skimps a bit on Langlois’ twilight years (ironically during the time the author became most friendly with the man), as he drifted from one teaching job to another, this can be forgiven in light of the documentation of the Cinematheque’s 1968 decision to dismiss Langlois. This act created an object of scandal seldom seen in the cinema community. People picketed outside the Cinematheque, and filmmakers from around the globe wired in threats to remove prints of their films from Paris unless Langlois was reinstated. Roud thrillingly recounts the scandal day by day, as more filmmakers and historians joined Langlois’ cause. The author wisely compares these moments to the Student Revolution in Paris of only a few months previously, and suggests that this Cinematheque upheaval happened because the student protest raised people’s consciousness. These moments are the finest in a lovely book about a man whose importance to film history is inestimable.