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Langlois saved movies from death and disintegration, not just the rags of cinema but the riches as well. It is because of Langlois that Abel Gance’s silent-era epic “Napoléon” (1927) survives.
Jan 13, 2020 · Langlois set out to conceal films the Germans wanted destroyed and smuggle others overseas. At his request, Langlois’ allies hid film canisters in their homes and gardens.
- A Girl in Every Port + A Trip to The Moon
- Her Man
- Journey to Italy
- The Shanghai Gesture
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- Double Feature: Daïnah La Métisse + Remorques
- Langlois + All The Boys Are called Patrick + Citizen Langlois
- Selected Short Films of Germaine Dulac
- The Wind
- Unter Den Brücken
A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks, 1928, US, 35mm, 76 min.) Howard Hawks’ best-known silent film features two sailors (Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong) whose rivalrous friendship leads to rowdy and amorous adventures around the world. The iconic silent star Louise Brooks plays a carnival performer who catches the eye of both men.A Girl in Eve...
Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees) is a pretty pickpocket who works the Thalia, a rowdy bar in Havana frequented by hustlers, addicts and drunken sailors. Orphaned as a girl and exploited by her live-in boyfriend Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez), Frankie seems resigned to her abysmal lot until she meets earnest sailor Dan (30s heartthrob Phillips Holmes). Undenia...
Misunderstood on its release, Journey to Italy is now regarded as one of Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini’s greatest masterpieces. It depicts the deteriorating marriage of a British couple (George Sanders and Rossellini’s real-life wife Ingrid Bergman) while on vacation near Naples and on the island of Capri. One of several remarkable films mad...
Disappointed by the conventional offerings at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1949, Langlois and author/filmmaker Jean Cocteau organized a film festival in nearby Biarritz that they named Festival du Film Maudit, meaning “cursed” or “damned” films. Included were then-infamous works like Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic Fireworks, and many others that were o...
How are the mysterious Dr. Caligari and his sinister somnambulist Caesar able to predict the future? What do they have to do with the recent murders in Holstenwall? A monumental work whose influence on popular culture and the horror genre is difficult to overstate, Caligari, with its iconic Expressionist sets is a film that demands to be seen on th...
Daïnah la Métisse (Jean Grémillon, 1932, France, 35mm, 51 min.) This early sound film from Jean Grémillon offers an unflinching take on race and class. (Gaumont cut the film by a whopping 39 minutes when first released, and the footage has never been restored.) On an ocean liner where there's always music or a masked ball to occupy the wealthy pass...
Langlois (Roberto Guerra, Eila Hershon, 1970, US, DCP, 52 min.) This 52-minute documentary, made in 1970, offers a whimsical, anecdotal portrait, interspersing interviews with Mr. Langlois’ associates and admirers (Lilian Gish, Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Kenneth Anger, and Viva, among others) with footage of him as he walks around Paris, h...
Best known for what is considered the first Surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1927), Germaine Dulac made close to thirty fiction films, as well as documentaries and newsreels. A feminist and avant-garde pioneer (who contributed to the creation of the Cinémathèque française), Madame Dulac’s lyrical approach to cinema involved music, m...
Letty Mason (Lilian Gish) moves from Virginia to live with her male cousin in the harsh windswept Texas plains. When jealousy consumes her cousin’s wife, Letty is forced out of the house and into a loveless marriage while dealing with the bleak landscape and its brutal blasts of wind. The final silent film of its star, Lilian Gish, and director, Sw...
Another favorite of Langlois, Unter den Brücken tells the story of two lonely bargemen who vie for the affection of a troubled young woman. Remarkably, the film was shot in Berlin in 1944 during the final days of Germany’s defeat, though the war is conspicuously absent from the narrative. In fact, the story was inspired by the Poetic Realism of Fre...
Henri Langlois and Georges Franju met Georges Méliès in 1935. Langlois would devote all his energy to locating traces of his vanished universe and to preserving his work.
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Documentary follows the career of the eccentric, longtime curator and film preservationist of the Cinematheque Francaise, founded by Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936. A fanatical collector, Langlois began by preserving silent films and hiding banned works from the Nazis during their occupation of Paris.
Langlois was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry and also co-founder of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 1938. Through close collaboration with the Cinémathèque's longtime chief archivist, Lotte Eisner, he worked to preserve films and film history in the post-war era.
