Henri Langlois

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Henri Langlois, the legendary cofounder of the Cinémathèque Française, changed the course of cinema history with his passionate advocacy for film culture, helping incubate the artistic explosion of the French New Wave. When the French government attempted to close down the Cinémathèque in 1968, Langlois’s movie mecca became a rallying point for the student protest movement that would soon bring France to the brink of revolution—and shut down that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Made two years later, this documentary portrait follows Langlois around the streets of Paris and features interviews with Lilian Gish, Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Kenneth Anger, Viva, and more.Read More »

Citizen Langlois by Edgardo Cozarinsky is an essayistic documentary about Henri Langlois, founder and head of the Cinémathèque française until his death in 1977. I recently rewatched this along with Jacques Richard’s much longer documentary (which is also on the tracker –here–) and liked it even better than the time I saw it first at the Berlin festival some years ago.
The movie mostly consists of archive footage, showing Langlois, the musée du cinéma, collaborators and famous actors and directors. The events around the Affaire Langlois in 1968 take some time here, too, but Cozarinsky succeeds in finding a different angle to focus on Langlois and cinéphilia in general.Read More »

“For the first decades of their existence, movies were seen not as works of art deserving preservation but as disposable commodities. The notion that they might be preserved, collected and studied was in the air by the mid-1930’s, but it took the pluck and persistence of a single eccentric Frenchman to make the idea a reality. The name of Henri Langlois — subject of “Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque,” a long, affectionate documentary directed by Jacques Richard — is not as well known as those of some directors whose work and reputations he saved from oblivion. Still, Mr. Richard’s film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art. And he was, after his own fashion, an artist — a collector and curator with the temperament of a poet. A shabbily dressed, chain-smoking walrus of a man, Langlois emerges in the course of this fascinating film as a maddening, inspiring figure, afire with intelligence and passion.”Read More »