Consider yourself fortunate. Since you're reading these words you
have access to a computer, the Internet, and an endless repository of
film, music, art, and culture. It wasn't always this easy.
In the 1930s, Henri Langlois founded the Cinémathèque Française, both
an archive and a theater, holding on to every film he could get his
hands on under the
notion that all film had some value to society.
Back then, the
history of film was much shorter and collecting prints
and preserving them was seemingly much easier. Everything was
stacked against Langlois, however: financial obstacles; major motion
pictures who wanted their prints destroyed; Nazis who wanted to burn
everything; and degradation over time - film's biggest elemental foe.
At a time before the VCR Langlois would continuously show films that were not
in their major runs: films of the past and films from the USA, Hungary,
Scandinavia, and anywhere else that was making films and exporting
them. His excitement of film was contagious, and the films he
allowed people to see were an inspiration to the next generations of
filmmakers.
During the Nazi
occupation, however, it became a struggle to escape the destruction of
important archives like comedic parodies of Hitler by Charlie Chapin
for example, and there were films that were confiscated by the regime,
feared lost forever, but eventually and seemimngly impossibly
recovered.
Langlois died in 1977, after being booted from the Board of Directors
of the Cinémathèque, then reinstated, then honored internationally,
then given a grant to open a museum, before the international
popularity of the VCR, the explosion of cable television, and the World
Wide Web. He never lost his vision and dedication and through the
film it's clear that the governments, even with a funding effort, can
never be trusted with the arts.
What director Jacques Richard has done was piece together numerous
interviews from the various people involved with the
Cinémathèque over the years and the stories of its importance to
youngsters who were to become some of the most noteworthy directors
over the following years. Richard combined them with interviews
of Langlois
himself and footage from events like the
riots of 1968 (where Langlois was booted as Chairman of the
Cinémathèque. The outrage and support from international filmmakers and
studios and demonstration itself illustrates how important Langlois and
his efforts were to the
preservation of the history of the motion picture.
Everybody who claims to love film owes it to themselves to see this,
whether it's showing near them at an art house or on DVD. It's
important to know exactly how much people fought to preserve the art of
the motion picture: facing the government, major motion picture
studios, and the elements which naturally decay film over time.