French Cinematheque nears 60th year

By Pierre Albert Lambert

PARIS: The French Cinematheque (film museum and library) will soon be 60 years old. The richness of its collections and its reputation make it the most important in the world.

The idea of creating a cinema museum and library in France resulted from a meeting in the early 1930s between film director Georges Franju, cinema historian Georges Sadoul and a young student who was mad about pictures, Henri Langlois. The latter was to spend his life looking for old films and cinema related objects in the most unlikely places.

With the arrival of the talkies, nobody before him had thought of keeping the old silent films which were no longer of any interest... except for the manufacturers of four-penny celluloid combs. Hence the idea of the three friends to set up a Cinema Circle, to make it easier to collect and protect their findings.

When it was created in 1936, official circles considered this initiative as being of no interest. Then the war came, making the cinema and its problems a minor concern. During the German occupation, only Langlois persevered in the mission that he had set for himself.

His flat soon filled up with old film reels from all kinds of places, flowing out of cupboards and drawers and even occupying his bath-tub. He put many of them in safe places, with friends in the provinces, in order to guard against having works which were banned by the Nazis confiscated and destroyed.

He had an impressive collection when the war ended. The new leaders appointed to head the cinema now realized the great importance of his collection. The Cinema Circle was allocated a grant and officially became the Cinematheque Francaise. As a private association having state support, its mission was to defend and save the cinematographic heritage.

First the collection was installed, in turn, in two small rooms in Paris, but it kept on growing. The prestigious collection, the shows that it devoted to great French film- directors and its retrospectives, made the Cinematheque and Langlois a legend. Young film-makers who were to start the new wave, such as Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard and Rivette, learnt about cinema at Langlois' "school".

"This dragon who watches over our treasures," as the poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau described him, continued his hunt for old films with such success that in the 1960s the successful Cinematheque was bursting at the seams. Something had to be done.

Langlois appealed to Andre Malraux, De Gaulle's Minister of Culture. The author of L'Espoir answered that it was not possible to increase the grant, but that space was available under the Palais de Chaillot (an official building). "Occupy it and we will turn a blind eye."

Langlois did not wait to be told twice. He moved his treasures and settled into the basement of the proud building overlooking the Seine, built in 1937 for the Universal Exhibition. The Cinematheque would remain there.

This was followed by the eventful years during which Langlois administration of the Cinematheque was contested by the political authorities. This was because Langlois, although a brilliant collector and event organizer, was quite the opposite when it came to efficiently administrating the developing institution.

Langlois had become a cinema cult figure when he passed away in 1977, after being awarded an Oscar by Hollywood as a tribute to his work. A recent inventory found the collection of the Cinematheque, to which Langlois had contributed the most, at about 30,000 films, more than a million photos, and as many posters, models, decors, texts and so on.

Of the father of the French Cinematheque, Truffaut was to say, "He was the Champollion of film. The only person in the world able to identify any work from a tiny scrap of film."

Treasure

The Henri Langlois museum, the pride of the Cinematheque, is a treasure chest for film-lovers. It groups together more than 5,000 objects. All these moving and sometimes unusual relics bring the cinema back to life right from its beginnings. The way in which they are exhibited obeys the principle that the founder had established: to follow the chronological development of the stages of the cinema. So it begins with the range of precursors of cameras and projectors which remind visitors that, before being an art, cinema was, first of all, a technique.

There is the 17th century magic lantern, Plateau's phenakis tiscope (1832) which produced a synthesis of movement, Marey's chronophotograph (1833) which was the first camera, and Reynaud's praxinoscope and his optical theater which liberated the cartoon.

A large area is devoted to Melies, the "Moliere" of cinema and the visit continues through the set for Wienne's Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari (1919), a reproduction of a robot in Lang's Metropolis (1926) (the original was destroyed by the Nazis), a setting from Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis (1944).

Fans of stars linger in front of the dresses that Vivien Leigh wore in Gone with the Wind, the sheikh costume of Rudolph Valentino (on whose tomb, according to legend, inconsolable beautiful women are said to have killed themselves), the costume of Einstein's Ivan the Terrible, the bathing suit of the water- nymph Esther William, Joan of Arc's suit of armor worn by Ingrid Bergman, Giulietta Massima's old clown's costume in La Strada, John Wayne and Henry Fonda's cowboy hats.

There are a thousand other treasures that some 50,000 French and foreign visitors admire every year. One visitor, the great King Vidor exclaimed, "On coming out of the Henri Langlois museum, we have the irresistible urge to run to a cinema to see one of those classics that brought us so much and filled us with delight."