Cinémathèque
Related: French cinema - film society - Henri Langlois
Related films: The Dreamers (2003) - Bernardo Bertolucci
Henri Langlois was, with George Franju and Jean Mitry, the co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française (a Paris-based film theater and museum) in 1936 and is regarded as a pioneer in film preservation and restoration. [Aug 2006]
Cinémathèque Française, Paris
Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (2004) - Jacques Richard [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Cinémathèque française
Cinémathèque française hosts the largest archive of films, movie documents, and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds screenings daily of a variety of films from all over the world.
The collection's origin stems from the intensive efforts of Henri Langlois in the 1930s to collect and preserve old films. Langlois had acquired one of the largest collections in the world by the commencement of World War Two, only to have it nearly wiped out by the German authorities in occupied France, who ordered all films made prior to 1937 be destroyed. He and his friends smuggled huge numbers of documents and films to unoccupied France to protect them until the end of the war.
After the war, the French government provided a small screening room, staff and subsidy for the collection, which was first relocated to Avenue de Messine. The great French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, including Robert Bresson, Rene Clement, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Jacques Becker, all frequented the screenings at the Cinémathèque after the war. The new wave school of directors — Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Jacques Donial-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast — also received much of their film education by attending the collection's screenings.
After moving from one small screening room to another through the 1950s, the Cinémathèque moved to its current spacious building at the rear of the Palais de Chaillot at Place du Trocadéro in Paris' 16th arrondissement in 1963. The current location houses a state-of-the-art screening room that is one of the best in Europe. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cin%E9math%E8que_Fran%E7aise [Feb 2005]
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