Henri Langlois
Henri Langlois ( born November 13, 1914 in Smyrna, now Izmir, † January 13, 1977 in Paris ) was a film archivist and the founder and long-time director of the Cinémathèque Française.
Life and work
Henri Langlois was born the son of a French journalist in the Ottoman Empire, visited in his youth the Lycée Condorcet in Paris and suggested - without completing the school with the Baccalauréat - then a career as a journalist one. Already in his youth he had been interested in the art of film. This enthusiasm was expressed first of all from rare copies - especially movies with Charles Chaplin and Fritz Lang - to collect. After the Cercle du Cinema launched, he founded together with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry in 1935, based in the Paris Cinémathèque Française, a film archive, museum and theater. Under the direction of Langlois and with the financial support of Paul -Auguste Harlé this facility to collect anything to get and to issue what was with film and cinema in connection began. In addition to film copies to cameras, projectors, posters, books, props and other things of importance in film history belonged. Langlois and his associates procured for film prints, inter alia, at flea markets; partly they were able to save footage from being made into nail polish or shoe polish or in the case of silver nitrate copies to serve for the extraction of silver.
Under his leadership, the work of the Cinémathèque 'hands free' style was heavily influenced by Langlois '. Inventories, which would have been enough professional standards, there was not for long, because Langlois everything in his head. In addition, emphasis was not always placed on a proper storage. And even with the consequence that a number of film copies rotted or fell victim to a fire. Funky was also the management structure: Langlois let himself look by anyone in the cards and had his wife Mary Meerson, Lotte Eisner and Marie Epstein, the sister of director Jean Epstein, gathered as the inner circle around.
The increasing importance of the Cinémathèque as "memory of cinema " did not harm these relationships but really. During the occupation of France by the German forces during World War II, for example, numerous films could be saved from the clutches of the occupiers. From the collections of old movies in addition went out (including François Truffaut, Jean -Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais ) a tremendous impact on the work of the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. Some of them were therefore referred to as les enfants de la cinémathèque ( Children of the Cinémathèque ).
Langlois ' idiosyncratic management style adopted by the then Minister of Culture, the writer André Malraux, in 1968 as an opportunity to underscore the government subsidies for the Cinémathèque. The aim of this action, namely the dismissal Langlois ', Malraux, however, could not reach it. Although the Cinémathèque has been closed for some time. With significant participation of Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Jean -Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Jean -Luc Godard and other sizes of cinema, there were massive protests and even a brief interruption of the Film Festival of Cannes. Malraux was bound to eventually come around. This so-called " Langlois Affair " has been immortalized in several later films, as in the opening credits of Truffaut's Stolen Kisses and in Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
About Langlois ' life's work are the rotated in the 1970 documentary Henri Langlois information. In interviews manifest itself, inter alia, Ingrid Bergman, Lillian Gish, François Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. For his life's work Langlois received an honorary Oscar in 1974.
Henri Langlois died on January 13, 1977 of heart failure and was buried at the Paris Montparnasse Cemetery. Posthumously, he was awarded in the same year with the prize of César.