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Green Mountain Film Festival: Henri Langlois - The Phantom of the Cinémathèque
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It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Henri Langlois to the history of film. No man did more to preserve the legacy of movies than Langlois, who has been called the “father of preservation” by no less than Jack Valenti, the former president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Langlois, who is the subject of a 2004 documentary by Jacques Richard screening at the Green Mountain Film Festival next week, was the co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, a Paris-based film archive established in 1936. It was the first institution to treat films with the same reverence bestowed upon great works of art or literature and it rescued countless titles in today’s film canon from destruction.
Many classics may have only existed in books today were it not for Langlois. He singlehandedly saved German masterpieces such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Blue Angel from the Nazis, the latter smuggled to Switzerland in a cloak and dagger operation normally reserved for closely guarded military secrets.
By 1948, he had preserved over 50,000 titles and began showing three films a day in an 80-seat broom closet of a theater. These were films you couldn’t see anywhere else in the world and might not see for another ten years if you happened to miss that evening’s show. Langlois thus invented the idea of a film classic in a medium that was only half a century old.
Through this nightly crash course in film history, Langlois also served as the father of the French New Wave, with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol getting their PhDs in cinema at his makeshift movie house. Richard’s film contains interviews with these auteurs, as well as archival footage of Langlois himself. A rotund, disheveled, mad-professor type, he looked like he slept in his wrinkled suit in a theater seat each night, such was his all-encompassing devotion to the movies.
His cinematic obsession and complete disregard for any outside interests would later get him in hot water with the French government. “Langlois was apolitical so all the politicians were against him,” said Chabrol. In 1968, André Malraux, the Minister of Cultural Affairs, led a movement to remove Langlois as the head of the Cinémathèque, which in turn prompted mass protests led by members of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma – events that were later recounted in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film The Dreamers.
The final masterwork of Langlois’ life was the Henri Langlois Museum, a painstakingly crafted visual history of the cinema told with costumes, set pieces, and other artifacts such as the dress Vivien Leigh wore in Gone with the Wind or the skull of Norman Bates’ mother from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Sadly, a fire in 1997 prompted the closing of the Langlois Museum, a building that for twenty-five years was the film world’s version of Mecca.
But Langlois’ legacy lives on today in organizations such as the American Film Institute or Turner Classic Movies. We often take for granted the fact that we can buy movies on DVD and watch them whenever we please, but Langlois invented the very concept of revisiting old films and of preserving films from deterioration and ultimate extinction.
The next time you go to the video store to rent the latest new release you missed in the theaters or a timeless classic like The Wizard of Oz, think about what it would be like to never be able to see that movie again. Then think about Henri Langlois, the phantom of the cinema.
Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque is playing Tuesday, March 24, at 8:30 pm at the City Hall Arts Center in Montpelier as part of the Green Mountain Film Festival.
View the complete schedule of the Green Mountain Film Festival
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