Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema (Twayne's Filmmakers Series)

Rating:
Summary: full of important insights into French attitudes about film
Review: "Henri Langlois, First Citizen of Cinema" ( beautifully produced with an excellent translation by Lisa Nesselson) is a fascinating account of Langlois' life and a captivating history of the Cinémathèque Française. More important, it is, in many ways, the story of contemporary French cinema. The book's authors, Glenn Myrent, an American in Paris, and Georges P. Langlois, Henri's brother, give us insight into French attitudes about film and show us to what extent Langlois had an important impact on the new wave directors and the generation of filmmakers that followed. In fact, Langlois almost single handily influenced the way that the French perceive film: cinema as an art form. The 7th art.

On a personal note, this was quite clear to me as a young film student sitting in the first rows of "La Cinémathèque Française" in the mid-sixties. Not only was I surrounded by would be filmmakers but also in the audience one would often see François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Susan Schiffman to name just a few. And there in the front row would be the young Bertrand Tavernier or the teenage Patrice Lecomte or Elio Zarmati. I remember standing in line outside the Cinémathèque and seeing Henri Langlois surrounded by new wave directors and film buffs passionately talking about films and filmmakers. It reminded me how, a few years earlier as university undergraduate, I would talk with fellow students about poets and poetry or writers and books with the same passion, the same enthusiasm. At the cinémathèque, I would watch, between 3pm and midnight, anything and everything: Chinese films with Czech subtitles, silent documentaries, Chaplin and Keaton comedies, whatever. I suppose we were the last generation of filmmakers who could be truly called "les enfants de la cinémathèque" - children of the cinémathèque. Glenn Myrent, in this excellent American edition, has managed to capture the magical atmosphere of La Cinémathèque that I knew. Not an easy task.

I, like many European filmmakers of my generation, am indebted to Henri Langlois. He communicated to me his passion for the cinéma and his cinémathèque was the single most important thing that helped me decided to become a filmmaker.

In my first feature, LA NUIT DE SAINT GERMAIN DES PRES, I have a small scene in which one of the protagonists organizes a screening at his home of an old 1932 cult movie, Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack and Irving Pichel's "THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME", starring Joel McCrea and Fay Wray, for left bank film buffs. In a way, this little scene was my way of saying "merci" to Henri Langlois and a kind of secret tribute to La Cinémathèque Française. And now 25 years later, "merci" Glenn Myrent and Georges Langlois for such an informative and entertaining book. Vive la Cinémathèque!

- Bob Swaim /Paris, 9-99