A Passion for Films : Henri Langlois & the Cinematheque Francaise (Paperback)

by Professor Richard Roud (Author), Mr. François Truffaut (Foreword) "Henri Langlois was born on November 12, 1914; the cinema as an art form and an entertainment was by then almost twenty years old..." (more)
Key Phrases: born internationalist, passion for films, nitrate prints, New York, Mary Meerson, City Center (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In this most engaging biography Richard Roud draws an affectionate portrait of Henri Langlois, a co-founder and the director of the Cinémathèque Française, a film library and screening room in Paris, tracing from November 1914 when he was born in Turkey until his death in January 1977... Roud is extremely informative, telling the reader about the wide variety of activities accomplished by Langlois both in France and abroad... What gives the whole book balance and integrity is the fact that the author's focus remains on Langlois' activities as an archivist who collects and exhibits films to thepublic as opposed to an archivist who just collects and stores them in a locked place... Roud provides us with an intensely vivid and illustrative account of the man whom Truffaut once described as a man as picturesque and as contradictory as a Dickens character, and the contribution he made to film culture both in France and abroad. Theimage of Henri Langlois which emerges from this book is certainly an intriguing figure with his absolutely extraordinary passion for films." -- Sachiko Shikoda, Scope: An On-Line Journal of Film Studies

"Richard Roud has written a truly great and important book that cannot fail to be considered a major contribution to film history." -- Marcel Ophuls, American Film

"Part scholarly biography and part personal memoir... this is a good place to start learning about one of film's most charismatic figures." -- Library Journal

"A Passion for Films is a perfect title for Richard Roud's loving biography of Langlois... His book is also a personal memoir and a brief history of film archives and archivists. Most important, A Passion for Films provides an account of how Langlois virtually single-handedly created what we call today a film culture." -- Dan Isaac, New York Times Book Review

"The greatest value of this book is the clear outline it gives of Langlois's career and the history of film archives... Langlois was a flawed man and a curator who aired his films a little too boldly sometimes. But as Roud argues, he was a key instigator of the last great burst of creative energy in filmmaking: the New Wave. America has so poor a record in preserving its own films that the story of Langlois's efforts makes a great lesson." -- David Thompson, New Republic

Review

"Richard Roud is the perfect Henri Langlois biographer." -- Louise Brooks

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (June 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080186206X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801862069
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,280,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fairly Slight Sketch of an Obsessed Film Fanatique, December 2, 2008

By	Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

After viewing the highly recommended Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque DVD I wanted to know more about the mysterious man who seems to have singlehandedly preserved innumerable classics of early cinema from the trash can of history. But this biography is rather slight mainly because there is not that much to tell about this man who really had no other interests or life outside of the cinematheque. Mostly what you get here are instances of his profound paranoia (he thought everyone was trying to steal his films) and instances of his profound disorganization (only Langlois knew exactly what films he had and where any particular film was at any given time). But nothing here is particularly revelatory.

I suppose the abiding interest in Langlois stems from the fact that he was an impassioned and independent amatore and that his life was organized (or not organized) according to his lifelong passion and not according to any professional or academic code of conduct. This makes him an attractive figure to artists for Langlois really had an artistic temperament which is to say that he was eccentric and temperamentally at odds with everything and everyone around him. Langlois wrote very little so he is not a name that film students and historians are likely to come across unless they are specifically interested in the history of film archives (Langlois was not the first to create a film archive but he was one of the first to understand the need to value and to preserve film history). Langlois's legacy is fourfold:

1)Langlois' primary legacy is the fact that he saved so many films from oblivion and since he refused to discriminate between a director's major and minor works (he knew that these kinds of judgments changed from generation to generation) he saved them all.

2) Langlois not only saved films from oblivion but showed them at special events and festivals and so exposed an entire generation of filmmakers and cineastes (the New Wave cineaste/filmmakers were his most famous students) to the great directors and actors and producers of film history including his own favorites: Louis Feuillade (who had been dismissed as a hack but who was later appreciated as a proto-surrealist), Howard Hawks (who had yet to be appreciated for the great talent that he was by American audiences), and Louise Brooks (who was re-discovered by Langlois and brough to France for a retrospective of her career). Other archives exsited in the world but few showed films as regularly as Langlois did. He was not an educator in the conventional sense nor were his programming methods in any way conventional (he was famous for his eccentric pairings) but he believed that by showing films budding directors and cineastes would learn by osmosis (and by comparing the films that he showed together).

3) By collecting and treating films with the reverence that he did he legitimized film as a major art form. Even though a number of his critics argue that his unconventional and improper storage practices resulted in the loss of at least one important film ( Josef von Sternberg's "The Honeymoon" ) his unconventional personality and practices certainly did more good than harm. No other person had the respect of so many directors, producers, and actors and so no other person could have accumulated so many films (many of which were given to him or "loaned" to him indefinitely) with so little funding.

4) He supported film history and preservation long before the government did. And once the government did get involved and tried to wrestle the archive and the rights to show films away from him he battled the state and won. This made him a cultural hero in France and in the US.

I suspect a better more engaging biography of Langlois will be written one day and perhaps one that will include more information and examples of his famous film festival programs. Until then this fact-filled account is an adequate if not altogether inspired portrait.

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute treasure for film buffs, February 20, 2009

By	S. Meimaris (Salamis, Greece) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a really wonderful book by the great film critic Richard Roud, providing the reader with many hours of pleasure, reminiscing about the golden epoch of the Cinemateque Francaise, that bastion of film lore, created and supported throughout his eventful life by sacred monster Henri Langlois. It tends to be a little tedious by providing minute information on the creation of the different Film Archives around the world, but I guess this is part of the whole thing.