Background
Henri Langlois was born on 13 November 1914 in Smyrna, İzmir, Turkey. Because his father was a journalist posted there, as well as someone involved in a variety of export-import deals. His mother was of Italian descent, but from a family that had gone to America in the middle of the nineteenth century and then returned. It was only in 1922 that Henri was taken by his family to France, and to Paris.
Education
Langlois never passed his baccalaureate exami¬nation. It is said that he got a zero on a paper where instead of writing about Molière, he tried to argue that Chaplin was superior. So he passed into the world unqualified. He went to work at a printing shop, and that’s how he met Georges Franju. Together, the two young men formed a Cercle du Cinéma, a club for enthusiasts, a place for showing rare movies. From that group there grew the idea of a Cinémathèque—an organization formed to collect, preserve, and show the great films of history. It was always Langlois’s sense that they must preserve everything. He had his own strong tastes, but he w'as curiously open to a contrary idea—that at any given moment you couldn't be sure what would seem great later.
Career
The Cinémathèque was founded in 1935, by Langlois and Franju, on a donation of 10,000 francs from Paul-Auguste Marie, publisher of a French film trade weekly. The first prints they bought were The Fall of the House of Usher (28, Jean Epstein) and The Birth of a Nation (15, D. W. Griffith), They soon persuaded Alexandre Kamenka, a producer of avantgarde films, to deposit his collection with their Cinémathèque. And so they needed somewhere to put the stuff. Franju was friendly with Georges Méliès, the pioneer, who was li\ing in a retirement home. Close to that establishment was a building for rent. They leased it, and Méliès became the first caretaker of a collection that included many of his own films.
It was not Langloiss choice to specialize, yet at the same time he was very ready to identify masters—often people in neglect, like Louis Feuillade, von Stroheim, Stiller, Sjostrom, and Americans, too—Langlois was one of the first to see and crave more of the genius of Howard Hawks.
He also made moves to internationalize the archive movement by making friendships with Olwen Vaughan, at the British Film Institute in London, and with Iris Barry from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Indeed, he cultivated a circle of women in love with film, and in Paris he employed Lotte Eisner (a refugee from Nazism), Mary Meerson (widow of the great art director Lazare Meerson), and Marie Epstein, sister to Jean.
War was the test, and the great victory, in Langloiss approach. For he maintained what he had—sometimes lodging films with friends in the country; moving them around; keeping track, without written records—and also added to it. Richard Roud's fine book on Langlois, A Passion for Films, adds this extra (something surely worthy of a movie): that Langlois found a fellow enthusiast on the German staff in Paris, Major Frank Hensel, who was secretly drawn into aiding and protecting the Cinémathèque. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, Langlois mounted a season of American films, most of which had been barred for the Nazi years: Modern Times (36, Chaplin); Gone With the Wind (39, Victor Fleming); Gain to Town (35, Alexander Hall); Each Dawn I Die (39, William Keighley); Abe Lincoln in Illinois (40, John Cromwell); Our Town (40, Sam Wood); and Young Mr. Lincoln (39, John Ford).
After the war, on the Avenue de Messine, Langlois began his unique programmed shows—three screenings in an evening, with the films made to compare and contrast, sometimes to follow a career. And it was there that, by around 1950, Langlois had attracted the greatest film society we have ever known (though maybe some of the Hollywood screening rooms of the golden age could rival it): André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Roger Leenhardt, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, Chris Marker and so on. Cahiers du Cinema was not the publication of the Cinémathèque, but it was the yellow-covered clarion of that generation. To this day, there has never been a band of opinion makers who were so of ten right. It is the moment at which the history of film as a whole begins to be felt and described, and it would not have been possible without Langlois.
Thus, in 1968, when André Malraux, the minister of culture, attempted to oust Langlois and make his administration more modern, that generation rallied to the assistance of the great man. The French government caved in—which did not mean that Langlois by then was other than an autocrat, a muddle, and a man who could hardly recall where he had put everything. But he was an international figure, and he was involved in plans for an American Cinémathèque.
Of course, he died on the eve of video and before computerization had taken over so many archival processes. But we knew how much of the heritage of movies had been lost already, and we had the French example to inspire a generation of passionate archivists all over the world (it has embraced Enno Patalas, Bob Gitt, and David Meeker as well as Tom Luddy, William K. Everson, and David Packard—in short, anyone crazy about film and taking care of it).
Not that Langlois ever believed that films should be kept and not shown. He believed that the film stock needed to be exercised—to be run. No matter the hours and years he spent over cans, repairing sprocket holes, wiping off nitrate “sweat,” he knew that the real life was on the screen, in the act of projection, with audiences. He loved everything film had done, which included silents, nitrate stock, Technicolor, and real manual projection. He would have seen the drabness and the usefulness in video, the loss of life, and he would have decried the loss of light in so much modern filmmaking.
But, of course, today, without any credentials, he would never be employed. The only chance he ever had of getting in on the archive game was by inventing it—and by treating it as a matter of life and death.
However you answer, remember the great, shabby, untidy figure of Langlois, who might be walking around with Eldorado in his dedeep pockets—the Marcel L’Herbier version, from 1922, in one pocket, the later Hawks version in the other.
Personality
Towards the end of his life, there were young, trained archivists who said that, well, of course, Henri Langlois was all very well, but he was chronically untidy, unsystematic, and so passionate that he was not above or beyond sometimes losing or inadvertently destroying some of the very things he treasured. Henri Langlois, they said, was his own worst enemy, and helplessly old-fashioned. In 1968, the famous attempt to remove Langlois from what was his Cinémathèque owed a great deal to clerical and bureaucratic squeamishness at his methods, and to the matter-of-fact observation that, after all, the Cinémathèque belonged to the nation.
Very well; there is some truth in the argument. But, just to take ownership as an issue, it is the case that one day in 1945 Langlois called upon Pierre Braunberger, a fine man and a good producer, Renoirs producer sometimes in the thirties, but Jewish and hounded during the war, and gave Braunberger a thing lie thought was lost forever—the negative of Renoirs Partie de Campagne. One way or another, during German occupation, Langlois had saved those cans—and kept that film alive. He handed it over and asked for nothing in return (except a print for the Cinémathèque, perhaps).
He was in his early teens when sound transformed the medium he loved already, and emotionally he seems to have been especially saddened by the way in which a whole range of films, and often their stars, effectively disappeared with the new rage for sound. He wanted to hold on to them. He frequented the few Parisian cinemas that kept an allegiance to silent pictures. And he began to develop the notion that anyone’s pleasure in the dark depended on cans of “stuff," awkward, unmanageable snakes of it, all on the dangerous and unstable nitrate stock, and all of it so easily junked for the prospect of reclaiming the silver that made film alive.