henri langlois: remembering a titan of french cinema

8/12/2019 Henri Langlois: Remembering a Titan of French Cinema

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Le Muse imaginaire d'Henri Langlois exhibition

and film Henri Langlois (1970) by Roberto Guerra and Eila Hershon

(digitally restored and preserved by La Cinmathque franaise, screened

June 2nd)

Both at La Cinmathque franaise Muse du cinema

51 rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris

Le Muse imaginaire d'Henri Langlois runs from April 9thto August 3

rd.

by Joseph Nechvatal

Published at Hyperallergic as

Henri Langlois: Remembering a Titan of French Cinema

http://hyperallergic.com/132848/henri-langlois-remembering-a-titan-of-

french-cinema/

In another moment Alice was through the glass and had jumped lightly

down into the looking-glass room.

-Lewis Carol,Alice in Wonderland

The invention of cinema, and the rapidity with which it spread, is closely

connected to the fact that perspective, and its specific corresponding

intellectual configuration, had pervaded visual habit since the Renaissance.

With the ever-present, ever-available ubiquity of cinema today - in airplanes,

on YouTube and Netflix, on cable movie channels (like TCM) - familiarity


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may not always breed contempt, exactly; but it does tend to inspire

complacency. We are tempted to overlook cinema, to take for granted what

has become blatantly ubiquitous and familiar. We may even look at it and

not register the presence of cinema (both good and bad quality-wise) without

an understanding of its history. Waking up to this history is the benefit of

exposing oneself to the exhibition Le Muse imaginaire d'Henri Langlois,

(currated by Dominique Pani) and the documentary film portrait Henri

Langlois (1970) by Roberto Guerra and Eila Hershon.


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Unknown photographer, Henri Langlois (left) and Georges Franju DR

Collection La Cinmathque franaise


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Enrico Sarsini, Langlois transportant des bobines de film Enrico

Sarsini.


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Norbert Huffschmidt, Dennis Hopper & Henri Langlois at the inauguration

of the Cinmathque in Nice, July 13th (1976) PHOTO Norbert

Huffschmidt

Langlois (1914-1977), as we experience close-hand in the Guerra/Hershon

52 minute anecdotal documentary, was the extravagant, clever, colorful,

resourceful, tenacious and quintessential European avant-garde film

enthusiast who co-founded and ran the Cinmathque Franaise and the

International Federation of Film Archives. I found this passionate film (and

Langlois himself, who passed away just seven years later) to be powerfully

lavish (i.e., aesthetically-informationally intense) while being quirky.

Langlois appears philosophically-humorously inclined and deeply interested


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in liberational politics.

Unknown Photographer, Portrait dHenri Langlois DR Collection La

Cinmathque franaise

We learn of the Langlois legend from very closely cropped talking heads

such as Simone Signorets, who recalls that Langlois would halt a film in the


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middle if he felt the audience was too stupid to deserve it. Kenneth Anger,

Viva, Lillian Gish, Ingrid Bergman, Catherine Deneuve, Jean Renoir, Jeanne

Moreau and Francois Truffaut all sing, with starry-eyes, his praises.

Someone recounted how Langlois screened Sergei Eisensteins film

Battleship Potemkin (1925) secretly in his mothers tiny apartment during

the German occupation, at the time when Soviet film was forbidden and

such screenings harshly punished.

These engaging interviews are mixed in with footage of Langlois talking

while walking around a picturesque 1970 Paris. This tour is enormously

emotive, as he shows us where he grew up poor on a street of whores, the

house in which Jean Renoir lived, various locations of La Cinmathque

franaise, and, in a park lake, a swimming black swan that he loves;

something that symbolizes his devotion to film and the artistic freedom to

risk. Of course, one mustnt overlook the element of posturing that often

accompanies such existential narratives.


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Man Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Henri Langlois & Jean Renoir (vers 1960)

MAN RAY TRUST / ADAGP, Paris 2014.


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Unknown Photographer, Henri Langlois (right) giving the Lgion

dhonneur to Alfred Hitchcock, January 14th

(1971) SIPA.

Yet his one-way conversation is riveting, as he collides bawdiness with

belief. It is clear that for Langlois film is synonymous with some imperative

promise of liberation: not only aesthetic liberation, but social, political, and

even what I might call metaphysical liberation. So it is not surprising that

there is also a newsreel clip with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in

heated protest against Langloiss brief dismissal by Andr Malraux in early

1968, prefiguring the revolutionary demonstrations of May 68.


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Unknown Photographer, Christiane Rochefort, Jean Rouch, Claude

Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard & Henri Attal lors dune manifestation de soutien

Langlois, rue dUlm, le 11 fvrier (1968) DR Collection La

Cinmathque franaise.


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Unknown Photographer, Henri Langlois & Andr Malraux at the exhibition

Path on June 23rd

(1959) DR Collection La Cinmathque franaise.

Most powerful people in the art world today seem to retain little of the

idealism that permeated the power of Langlois and his romantic-artisticmorals. Yet this is an ambition that many artists continue, in more routine

ways, to embrace. Indeed there is no question that the film itself is idealistic,

while being informative. This is a helpful thing when viewed from the post-

media critical perspective. By stepping back and considering the art of

cinema through Langloiss eyes, we can perhaps begin to outline a response

to the calamities that cinema is suffering today, and the great damage that

has been done to public taste evident with the widespread sense of staleness,

futility and disenchantment around movies that has a lot to do with the

character of todays celebrity culture.


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The syntactic surface of the Guerra/Hershon film is spare, conversational

and highly informal. It is intimate and imagistic, yet not overly confiding;

just enough to convey a sense of Langloiss passion for cinema. A passion

laced with dada humor, inclusiveness, and double-edged flirtations. It is not

a film about a film collectors life that slips into un-enchanted forms of

psychoanalysis.

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le fou (1965)

StudioCanal.


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Rather, the film builds a web of promiscuous images of Langlois in the

throes of preserving an art form that will not stand still -- images that

Guerra/Hershon knew were valuable enough to preserve on film. But not

only is the film made with ingenuity and a sense of relaxed ease, it indirectly

evokes issues of deception and illusion in direct contact with their

counterparts: authenticity and honesty. It questions the very possibility of

separating a person from his/her presentation and of establishing a measure

of genuineness of that person.

The problem poised by the Guerra/Hershon film is not then simply one of

historic being, but of how the chosen is plucked from the chaotic-what-else-

was. Along with a series of finer distinctions, contradictions and options,

this question of the collecting of possible scattered histories and outcomes

seems to me to be the central hub of Guerra/Hershons work. Intimacy and

connection becomes a matter of short-lived similitude.

These film resemblances, these ghostly presences, are contingent on the

moving image itself and its ability to discriminate and liken. The omissions

(and continuities) of the rectangular frame that is imposed by the movie

camera and cast onto Langlois is the source of both this films failure to

preserve entirely this preserver of film - and its poignant joy. There are of

course great pleasures to be found in the very failure of cinema to accurately

imitate life; for example, films ability to imaginatively convert absence into

presence.


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Le Muse imaginaire d'Henri Langlois installation view (photograph by

the author)

Deception trades partners with dedication in the elaborate dance of

representation at Le Muse imaginaire d'Henri Langlois (imaginary

museum) exhibition as it conveys, through stillness, a sense of a man

dedicated to the dreamy flow of moving images conjured up by electricity.

The art, photographs, posters, clips and text presented wall-to-wall here

deepen the multiple ramifications of the Guerra/Hershon portrait and emit a

lush sensuous coating to Langlois and his archival work.

The content-level of the exhibition is quite dense. Without all of the

assumptions of progress that have hexed Western culture, Langlois is put in

connection with European avant-garde cultural trophies such as Marcel


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Duchamps eminent Rotoreliefs (1935), Francis Picabias marvelous

Optophone II (1921-1922), Gino Severinis masterful La danse du pan-

pan au Monico (Le pan-pan au Monico) (1909 - 1960) and Fernand

Lgers cute Charlie Chaplin homage Charlot cubiste (1924) - along with

works by Picasso, Warhol, Chagal, Disney, Matisse, Vasarely and Calder.


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Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs (1935)


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Francis Picabia, Optophone II (1921-1922)


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Gino Severini, La danse du pan-pan au "Monico" (Le pan-pan au

"Monico") (1909 - 1960)


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Joan Miro, Letter to Henri Langlois, June 19th

(1969)


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Walls are covered with headlines, dates, letters (the one from Joan Mir is

very beautiful), newspaper clippings and many photographs.

Unfortunately, it is evident that Langlois has not been re-conceptualized

within any coherent discourse of social revision due to the epistemological

impact of film as central to the art-entertainment complex. Yet what I

appreciated about the exhibit is its almost romantic reference to a deep time,

a shadow life of solid nonverbal existence that sits largely outside of the

flowing energy of the moving image.

henri langlois: remembering a titan of french cinema

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