The wild archivist

Penelope Gilliatt

Along with spies, pregnant women, and chefs, film archivists are probably one of the most paranoid groups in society. The great Henri Langlois, founder, sage and Cerberus of the French Cinematheque, who died twelve days ago, seemed almost dedicated to his persecution mania. He clung to it as the decoy characteristic of a passionate historian because he knew unconsciously that it was the source of his unique contribution to the cinema. He has no heirs. The archives of the British Film Institute may be more rationally run, like the archives of the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but what they make up in reason they lack in genius. Without Langlois's obsessed and poetic career, film might not know that it has a history.

He collected cans of film most of his life. He never knew how many prints the Cinernatheque possessed. Fifty thousand at least; maybe many more. He was too busy hunting down further cans in the fleamarkets to count. His mania for film was equalled only by his specialised knowledge of ginger marmalade, which he used to eat with a teaspoon out of a jar balanced on the jut of his favourite brown polo neck sweater. I once took him a jar of Irish whiskey marmalade that was a great success with him at an exquisite Chinese dinner at four in the morning, his usual time to dine.

He was never an easy man to find. I have at least ten telephone numbers in Paris for him. Six are restaurants. The one of his apartment is a blind because the telephone was cut off. He preferred not to pay his phone bill. The others are for friends and for various of his sentry posts in the Cinema theque, which is housed mostly in the Palais de Chaillot, where there are two cinemas and a film museum. (There is a third cinema on the Left Bank.) One of the more likely places to find him was at the cash table by the entrance of his favourite Petite Salle in the Palais, where he would take the ticket money and watch enthusiastically for signs of some young loiterer who might turn out to be one of the next generation's best film directors. When Truffaut was a boy he used to hang around the Cinernatheque day after day; Langlois recognised a fanaticism kin to his own, and would let him sit the programme round and round without paying.

French cinema—world cinema—divined in Langlois the father of the modern movement and the grandfather of Truffaut, God

ard, Chabrol. 'Maybe there is the new Francois,' he would whisper, watching an entranced young vagrant. 'Or there.' When

Malraux tried early in 1968 to dislodge him for a more manageable nonentity, the film community flew into uproar. His fierce

allies included Renoir, Kurosawa, Visconti,

Chaplin. Cables poured in. French filmmakers organised protest marches that

many. of the politically-minded believe to have been an unwitting training era for the events of May 1968.

Langlois was born in Smyrna in 1914 to a half-American, half-French mother and a French diplomat father. He may have been an unruly child by the standards of his family. He told me once that his uncle thought he was a Communist because he didn't play bridge. He paused, and then said. 'I still don't.' His care for films was matched by his carelessness about himself.

His great love, Mary Meerson (widow of the designer), who is a woman of immense cul tivation, once tried to get him to be fitted for a couture suit. Langlois refused unless the couturier would come and do the fittings

while he was sitting down. His great bulk

seemed made for the right angles of chairs, perhaps because of the number of films he has sat through, watching everywhere for the original with his soft, brown, filmsoaked eyes. Like Mme Meerson, who often dresses in men's African robes because they save her the trouble of having outsize clothes made, he seemed to have mass with out weight, and he had the daintiness in motion of many big men. It went with the fastidiousness of his nature. He once reacted

violently against a satin-walled restaurant

that he said was like a brothel. When he stood, or sped round his Museum to show Keaton's boater or a Lillian Gish dress or an Eisenstein drawing, his shape was roughly an oval; he moved like a porpoise bal anced on its tail. He was a man of immense charm, and a peculiarly debonair gravity that could turn in a second into an embracing humour.

There were only two things that really enraged him professionally. One was the feeling common among other archivists that

precious films should not be exhausted by actual screenings of them. He thought, very

simply, that films exist to be seen. The

second was the feeling also common among other archivists that the process of preserva

tion involves selection. Langlois believed in

saving everything. He said that no one man at one moment in history would possibly judge what was worth saving. His catholicism led him to hoard any can of film be could track down. His greed on his collection's behalf was limitless, and his affec tion untiring. Many a time, to the fury of some of his fellows, he saved a print said to be beyond repair by treating it himself frame by frame and hanging the unspliced film on a clothes line to dry. He believed that some of the most valuable films in the collection were saved by salt—by being hidden from the Nazis during the War in the cellars of châteaux where salt used to be stored. It was about this sort of thing that run-of-the-mill and possibly less inspired archivists used to fight with him. Hard to imagine that he could have existed anywhere but in Europe, this man of international blood who sometimes used to dream Greek poetry and who was, by character, attracted to sorcery and fortune-telling and magic. Film, after all, has its origins in Melies's magic lantern. When the muchhoped-for American Cinematheque was being planned—he was to have been involved in the endeavour—the organising was done partly by a beautiful American woman whom Langlois approached with wariness. 'I think she is perhaps a spy,' he said to me perfectly seriously. He saw enemies everywhere, but theY were always enemies of film, never enemies to his own career, which he treated with the same sort of tasualness that he extended to his health, his hours of sleep, and his tele' phone bill. Almost everything in the apart' ment where he lived in Paris had been gradually sold to buy films for the collection. He was one of the first people to introduce the European audience to Japanese films. His love was given with equal expansiveness to two-reelers, to the great silents, to an)' thing that possessed the urgency of the innovative. His lectures on montage vvere memorable. He didn't like grey marks on old movies and would go to any lengths t.o be rid of them; greyness belonged on his clothes, he would say firmly. If an onecatalogued film scheduled for showing wer, to be temporarily lost—his disdain 113.'s time-wasting over the keeping of record when he could be saving films earne him the antagonism of some of his 113°r`a finicky confreres—he would sinnplY find A substitute film to show his audience make something brilliant of the chance. believed in the creative energy of the act dental, just as he believed with all his he.a that 'Vandalism lies in forgetting, in makin,.16. do with little when much needs to be saveoe It would be an act of vandalism if we vier to forget this moving and noble man. Ththe has never been anyone like him in

cinema.