eating the screen
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Richard (director) Henri Langlois: The
Phantom of the Cinémathèque / 2005
How
to describe the rotund Henri Langlois? He was a kind of genius, perceiving,
with-founder Georges Franju, far earlier than other archivists, just how
important it was to save older films, particularly “lost” silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He was a
showman who introduced older films to many French directors, particularly those
of the New Wave such as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, as
well as later celebrating their work. He was a kind of cultural hero, saving
hundreds, if not thousands, of cultural artifacts from destruction by the Nazis
during World War II. Actress Simone Signoret reveals that she helped transport
the illegal films in a baby carriage.
Langlois clearly was a kind of charmer,
finding finances for his cinémathèque from the most
unlikely of sources. And through his regular film screenings, sometimes
presenting as many as three showings each night, he might be described as a
remarkable educator of an entire generation of film-lovers.
Yet director Jacques Richard’s documentary
also reveals him to be a kind of cultural glutton without the real abilities, desire,
or talents to create the cinema he so loved. And French governmental authorities,
when finally determined to help fund the organization he had created, found him
to be a terrible businessman without proper records and budgetary skills.
Richard presents this information and
much else through the incredible gathering of at least 80 talking heads from
Georges Melies’ granddaughter to Pierre Cardin and Alfred Hitchcock. So many voices
shot usually head-on does not itself make for great cinematic viewing. But
fortunately Richard intersperses these discussants with brief clips from many
of the greatest films Langlois collected along with numerous still and video
images of the archivist himself.
As the reviewer from Variety, Todd McCarthy summarizes:
In
other words, Richard has filled his 3½ hours with
enormously
diverse material that meshes to create a
picture
of the man that is satisfying on both the intellectual
and
human planes. For anyone with a pre-existing interest
the
subject, absorption in the film is so total that the time
passes
in a flash; for younger viewers who find their
way
to it, pic represents the ultimate illustration of what
devotion
to the cinema means, and incidentally underlines
the
individual obsession that initiated the now-widespread
effort
to preserve the history of the cinema.
Despite the informative value of Richard’s
film, however, I felt that, in the end, I would rather have attended the cinémathèque
itself rather watch this documentary about it, and it might have been far more
interesting, I suspect, instead of simply reporting what Langlois achieved—as significant as 
that was—why he chose to collect film,
particularly films of the past; what led this man to become a sort of state
librarian to cinema art? Moreover, since he espoused the idea that all films of
equal interest, since they revealed the life of the times, why did he let a
film starring Theda Bara escape his hands? What criteria did Langlois have for
inclusion? And how did he convince so many people not so very committed to film
of the past to finance his purchases.
Since this was a “collection,” one
wonders what he didn’t collect among the 80,000 titles of the cinémathèque? Did
he include documentaries such as this one, cartoons, media, highly experimental
works such Stan Brakhage? How did he organize them or decide each evening what
films he might show?
Finally, I might ask one of the most
important of questions that never truly gets discussed. Did the collector
actually comprehend the thousands of films and could he write coherently about
them? As a film reviewer, I feel this is one of the most important of
questions. It’s clear that Langlois loved the genre and had a fairly discerning
sense of what might be significant. Yet Richard gives us little idea about how
the collector/archivist saw in the thousands of films he gathered.
Chabrol does not discuss any conversations
he had with Langlois, for instance, but only wonders what the corpulent
Langlois and his equally plump partner, Mary Meerson, might had done in bed: “I
tried to imagine them in frenzied copulation, but … .”
If nothing else, Langlois had an enormous
appetite not only for food but for “eating the screen.”
Los Angeles, March
18, 2019
Reprilnted
from World Cinema Review (March
2019).
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