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The Cinémathèque française — celebrating 90 years and 2 revolutions (rewind) · MUBI Podcast

0:03
SPEAKER_03: Hi everybody, your host Rico Galliano here, and I want to set up what you're about to listen to.
0:08
SPEAKER_03: This month, the legendary Cinematech Francaise in Paris is celebrating its 90th birthday with a big retrospective.
0:16
SPEAKER_03: So we are too with this encore upload of one of our very early episodes all about the Cinema Tech.
0:23
SPEAKER_03: This was the kickoff to our second season telling the stories of great cinemas that changed movie history.
0:29
SPEAKER_03: I hope you enjoy, and heads up, it includes adult language and just at the beginning, forgive me, a few minutes of nostalgia.
0:42
SPEAKER_03: So in the late 80s, I got one of my first jobs as an usher and then a manager of a movie theater in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
0:51
SPEAKER_03: One Sunday morning last fall, for the first time in 30 years, I went back with a guide.
0:57
SPEAKER_02: Ann Irwin, operations manager with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and we are on the street, 6th Street and Fort Duquesne Boulevard in downtown Pittsburgh, and we're under the marquee of the Bime Theater.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: Formerly the Fulton Theater, and prior to that, originally the Gaiety Theater.
1:16
SPEAKER_03: In my day, it was still the Fulton, a gilded 1300-seat house originally built for vaudeville, that in post-industrial Pittsburgh had fallen into pretty serious shabbiness.
1:27
SPEAKER_03: We showed indie and art house films on the giant 30-foot screen, usually for like 10 paying customers and a couple of friends we let in free.
1:35
SPEAKER_03: And for a few years there, it was my whole life.
1:39
SPEAKER_03: Alright, let's go inside.
1:49
SPEAKER_03: The place has been renovated, but as soon as I'm through the big brass frame doors, I remember everything.
1:55
SPEAKER_03: The spot where our little box office stand used to be.
1:58
SPEAKER_03: One time I sold Mr.
1:59
SPEAKER_03: Rogers a ticket there.
2:01
SPEAKER_03: The radiators near the front entrance, which didn't work then or now.
2:04
SPEAKER_02: It's still cold in here.
2:06
SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: Not air conditioned either.
2:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's all just like I remember it.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: Until we climb a stairway into the cavernous theater and out onto the balcony.
2:19
SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
2:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:21
SPEAKER_03: I don't remember that ceiling being that beautiful.
2:25
SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
2:27
SPEAKER_02: There is a mural of frolicking females.
2:32
SPEAKER_02: Most of them have sort of loose gowns on and their upper bodies are exposed.
2:37
SPEAKER_03: They're half naked.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: They're half naked, yes.
2:39
SPEAKER_02: And they're on sort of a cloudy blue sky background.
2:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I always, in my mind, I remember them as being uh angels.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: Well, they're up in they're up in the heavens.
2:51
SPEAKER_02: They sort of do have an angelic feeling, I guess.
2:54
SPEAKER_03: She's right, that's part of it.
2:56
SPEAKER_03: But I realize it's also that my memory of the theater is totally tied up with my memories of a movie we showed there, right after I took the job.
3:04
SPEAKER_03: Them vendors, Wings of Desire.
3:09
SPEAKER_03: A movie about angels walking the streets of Berlin.
3:13
SPEAKER_03: And if you've seen it, you can imagine what it must have been like for a teenager to watch it over and over in a derelict old theater, sitting at the edge of a balcony.
3:24
SPEAKER_03: Shot by Henri Alacan in this kind of glowing black and white, his roaming camera floats through Berlin's libraries, hovers over its streets, and leaps back and forth over the Berlin wall.
3:40
SPEAKER_03: It glides around a nightclub where crime and the city solution writhe in a cloud of tobacco smoke.
3:46
SPEAKER_03: It's a band I'd never heard playing a kind of music I thought I hated.
3:55
SPEAKER_03: Instead, suddenly I got it.
3:58
SPEAKER_03: The romance of Goth.
4:05
SPEAKER_03: The camera circles over Berlin like a plane.
4:08
SPEAKER_03: Up in the Fulton balcony, actual clouds painted on the ceiling above me.
4:12
SPEAKER_03: I felt like a passenger.
4:14
SPEAKER_03: Wings of Desire was the first movie that made me want to travel.
4:18
SPEAKER_03: Now I moonlight as a travel writer.
4:22
SPEAKER_03: Here's what I'm saying: that movie changed my aesthetics, my values, my life.
4:28
SPEAKER_03: And I guarantee it wouldn't have hit so hard if I hadn't seen it in that theater.
4:35
SPEAKER_02: One real very memorable experience was coming to see Lawrence of Arabia in 70 millimeter here at the Biome Theater.
4:44
SPEAKER_03: Later up in the projection booth, Anne Irwin tells me she knows what I'm talking about.
4:48
SPEAKER_02: I had never seen it, and my kids, of course, hadn't.
4:51
SPEAKER_02: And they were just fascinated and loved it.
4:55
SPEAKER_02: And it's such a long film that there's an intermission.
4:58
SPEAKER_02: And I was realizing how late it was getting.
5:01
SPEAKER_02: So we went home and then I got the tape of Lawrence of Arabia.
5:06
SPEAKER_03: So you could so they could finish watching it.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: So we could finish watching it because we were just entranced.
5:11
SPEAKER_02: Put it in on our TV at home.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: And I think after five minutes, I was the only one watching.
5:19
SPEAKER_03: Watching movies has never just been about the movies.
5:22
SPEAKER_03: It's also about where you watch them.
5:25
SPEAKER_03: I say certain movie theaters have made certain kinds of movies possible.
5:30
SPEAKER_03: They've created certain kinds of movie fans and movie makers, and sometimes I think a certain kind of world.
5:50
SPEAKER_03: Movie is the best place outside of theater to see beautiful hand-picked cinema.
5:54
SPEAKER_03: On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinema.
5:58
SPEAKER_03: Today we launched season two.
5:59
SPEAKER_03: We are calling it Only in Theaters.
6:02
SPEAKER_03: Because at a time when too many great theaters are closing down, we think it's time to lift them up.
6:06
SPEAKER_03: Every week we're going to tell you the story of a single cinema that made history.
6:10
SPEAKER_03: Usually movie history, but sometimes, like today, just history in general.
6:15
SPEAKER_21: We all went into the street to protest.
6:18
SPEAKER_21: Jean-Luc Godard was there, Chabrol was there, all the filmmakers, everybody was there in those demonstrations.
6:25
SPEAKER_03: That is Barbé Schroeder, one of the most important players in post-war French cinema, talking about the time a simple staffing change at his favorite movie theater literally led to blood in the Paris streets.
6:37
SPEAKER_21: Because the police started knocking on us with sticks, but really like if we were a public danger.
6:44
SPEAKER_03: The theater it was worth getting your head kicked in for was the Cinematek Francaise.
6:48
SPEAKER_03: It's so important.
6:49
SPEAKER_03: Back in film school, they told us about it on literally the first day of class.
6:54
SPEAKER_03: But I never knew the half of it.
6:56
SPEAKER_03: So ticket, please.
6:59
SPEAKER_03: Enjoy the show.
7:08
SPEAKER_03: In Paris, the Metro subway trains stopped running every night around 1 a.m.
7:15
SPEAKER_03: Sometime in the mid-50s, that became a real hassle for a teenage Barbage Roder when he started religiously attending screenings at the Cinema Tech.
7:23
SPEAKER_21: We were a group of 10-15 people that were always talking after the movies and arguing between ourselves.
7:30
SPEAKER_21: You know, we had discussion every night about all the movies, very exciting.
7:35
SPEAKER_21: And of course, the discussions ended up on the sidewalks or in cafes.
7:41
SPEAKER_21: So I didn't see the time pass.
7:45
SPEAKER_21: And he'd miss the last metro repeatedly.
7:50
SPEAKER_21: And if you miss that one, there is no other way to come back home.
7:54
SPEAKER_21: You have to go walking through the city.
7:57
SPEAKER_21: So it happened to me three times where I was walking and sinking.
8:03
SPEAKER_21: And uh I think the third time I decided I know what I want.
8:11
SPEAKER_21: I want to make movies.
8:13
SPEAKER_21: Now I was only 14, you know, but I knew what I had to do, I knew what I wanted to do, and all my life, everything I did was connected to that.
8:24
SPEAKER_03: When I think of Paris in that era, that's what I imagine.
8:28
SPEAKER_03: Dozens of young people, eventually hundreds over time, walking the late night streets, getting ready to revolutionize movies.
8:35
SPEAKER_03: Largely thanks to one unlikely hero, the Cinematech's founder and programmer.
8:40
SPEAKER_19: Henri Langlois.
8:41
SPEAKER_19: Henri Langlois.
8:47
SPEAKER_21: He was, I think, from kind of Turkish family, I don't know which generation.
8:54
SPEAKER_21: He was a little bit on the fat side.
8:56
SPEAKER_21: He was not fat, he was just round.
8:59
SPEAKER_21: He was just round and sensuous, and you could imagine him eating a lot of lukums.
9:05
SPEAKER_21: And he was passionate, but he didn't show it.
9:08
SPEAKER_21: You could feel it.
9:09
SPEAKER_21: Oh, really?
9:10
SPEAKER_21: So he was kind of a low-key guy.
9:11
SPEAKER_03: He wasn't like a bombastic man.
9:13
SPEAKER_03: Quiet, yes, yes.
9:14
SPEAKER_03: But actually Langois's passion for movies spoke volumes from a very young age.
9:19
SPEAKER_04: He's supposed to have, in school, uh gotten into trouble by writing an essay claiming that Charlie Chaplin was a greater writer than Molière.
9:28
SPEAKER_03: That's Louis Menand.
9:30
SPEAKER_03: He teaches at Harvard and wrote about the Cinematech in The New Yorker, where he's a staff writer.
9:34
SPEAKER_04: So this would be in the early 1930s.
9:37
SPEAKER_04: And uh film, as you know, is a very perishable commodity because the film stock deteriorates.
9:44
SPEAKER_04: And film companies just when the film stock deteriorated, they would just lose the picture.
9:48
SPEAKER_04: They didn't really feel it was important to save them.
9:51
SPEAKER_04: And he decided he was going to make a mission to save old movies.
9:55
SPEAKER_03: Starting with his first love, silent movies, but eventually basically any movie.
10:00
SPEAKER_03: Also movie costumes, props, set pieces.
10:03
SPEAKER_03: Most people back then thought all this stuff was disposable.
10:05
SPEAKER_03: Langois was determined to preserve them and the films they came from by any means necessary.
10:11
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's a you know, every nobody really knew where he got the movies.
10:15
SPEAKER_04: Uh he had contacts everywhere, apparently, and he was very secretive about them.
10:20
SPEAKER_04: Nobody really knew where they were stored either.
10:23
SPEAKER_04: There's a story that he stored them in his bathtub, which was regarded as a comment both on the his passion for movies and also his sense of hygiene.
10:32
SPEAKER_03: To screen his treasures, he co-founded a film club, which eventually became the Cinematic Francaise, an outfit for preserving cinema.
10:40
SPEAKER_03: It was not a fancy enterprise.
10:42
SPEAKER_04: So originally there was it didn't have a theater.
10:45
SPEAKER_04: It was he would collect these movies and he would have gatherings in which he would show the movie in someone's apartment, and frequently they would gather in his mother's apartment for some reason.
10:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, at the time the Cinemate wasn't so much a place as a person.
11:00
SPEAKER_03: Langois, his passion, his charisma, his connections that kept the archives growing.
11:06
SPEAKER_03: That was the Cinematech.
11:11
SPEAKER_03: A lot of which was endangered when 1940 rolled around.
11:16
SPEAKER_03: An assembly of troops.
11:17
SPEAKER_03: That's the year French leaders surrendered France to Nazi Germany, signing an armistice with Hitler in a railway car near the Compagne Forest.
11:24
SPEAKER_10: After reading of the preamble of the German conditions, the Führer leaves Compire.
11:41
SPEAKER_15: So, like anything with Henri Langois, it can be hard to know what is truth and what is myth because he's such a mythmaker of his own life.
11:50
SPEAKER_03: Catherine Clark writes and teaches about France's visual history.
11:53
SPEAKER_03: She's an associate professor at MIT.
11:56
SPEAKER_15: But so during the war, he has a collection, he probably has about 5,000 films at that point, which is not nothing.
12:02
SPEAKER_15: And then he also says to distribution companies in France, give me your films, I will take them and hide them during the war, because he knows that the Germans are gonna want to destroy films.
12:15
SPEAKER_15: So, like the story goes that Hitler really wants to see Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
12:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he wants to see Chaplin's raging satire of Hitler himself.
12:29
SPEAKER_14: We must tighten our belt.
12:41
SPEAKER_03: And then Hitler wants to have as many prints of it as possible wiped off the continent.
12:45
SPEAKER_15: But he can't get his hands on a copy of it, and Cinemate France has a has a copy of it.
12:51
SPEAKER_15: So they are hiding things kind of all over France.
12:54
SPEAKER_15: There's a lot of like, we will hide this stuff because the Nazis are going to take it and either destroy it or use it for themselves.
13:00
SPEAKER_04: But he had to be quite secretive about it.
13:02
SPEAKER_04: There's a story that the actress Simone Signoret used to carry his movies around for him in a baby carriage with a blanket over them so that you wouldn't be uh stopped by soldiers.
13:19
SPEAKER_03: It didn't always work.
13:21
SPEAKER_03: At one point the Nazis did seize a chunk of the Cinematech collection, and Langois had to charm and cajole them to get the most important stuff back, even while he conspired with other Cinephiles to hide films all over Europe.
13:33
SPEAKER_03: Right now you're listening to the first feature-length German talkie, The Blue Angel.
13:37
SPEAKER_03: It probably only survived thanks to Langois.
13:44
SPEAKER_03: And meanwhile, Cinematech screenings went underground.
13:48
SPEAKER_03: In fact, decades later, the New York Times published a quote from Simone Signoret.
13:52
SPEAKER_15: Who talks about being in Paris during the occupation and Henri Langois going around in the Café Fleur, which is one of the very centers of intellectual life at the time, and kind of whispering from table to table that he was going to screen films that night and that everyone should come.
14:10
SPEAKER_03: So I mean it's it's almost like a speakeasy.
14:12
SPEAKER_03: Totally.
14:13
SPEAKER_03: Whisper, whisper, whisper, I'm gonna be showing these dangerous movies tonight.
14:16
SPEAKER_03: Don't tell anyone.
14:17
SPEAKER_15: Yes, don't tell anyone.
14:19
SPEAKER_15: And this is something Langwa cultivates after the occupation as well, that the Cinematech isn't just a movie theater, it's a movement and it's a community, and it is not for everyone, and therefore people really want to be part of it.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: And did they ever?
14:39
SPEAKER_03: Langua emerged from World War II as a movie martyr, a guy who risked his own safety to save cinema.
14:46
SPEAKER_03: His reward?
14:47
SPEAKER_03: In the mid-1940s, the state helped him sign a lease on an actual theater in Paris at Seven Rue de Messine, a place that drew a lot of people who would go on to be legends themselves.
14:58
SPEAKER_04: By the late 1940s, there were a million film societies and film clubs in Paris.
15:02
SPEAKER_04: Paris was movie crazy.
15:04
SPEAKER_04: And that's when the Cinematech became the place that all these young film directors and critics went all the time, like Truffaut, constantly.
15:12
SPEAKER_03: Well, but if there's so many choices, why then did they flock to Langoise Theater in particular?
15:16
SPEAKER_04: Because he had access to these incredible movies, had a lot to do with it.
15:20
SPEAKER_04: And then of course he'd become a kind of a culture hero or a cult figure.
15:24
SPEAKER_03: And everything about that theater made patrons feel they were a part of that select cult.
15:29
SPEAKER_15: It only has 38 seats.
15:31
SPEAKER_15: If you bring in extra chairs, you can fit 50-seated people.
15:35
SPEAKER_15: Directors will talk about lying and sitting on the floor in the very front row to watch films.
15:41
SPEAKER_15: Langwa mythically never shows the same film twice.
15:46
SPEAKER_15: Obviously, that's not true at all.
15:47
SPEAKER_15: He often shows the same film twice, but it's all part of his myth and his aura, so people have to go to the cinematech and they have to go all the time.
15:57
SPEAKER_15: Because if you miss something, you might not get another chance to see it.
16:01
SPEAKER_16: Well, my first experience was 1950.
16:06
SPEAKER_16: I saw birth of a nation.
16:09
SPEAKER_03: Luc Moulet would go on to become a renowned critic and filmmaker, but he was a teenager at the time and a regular.
16:15
SPEAKER_03: And he remembers a nightly rite of passage.
16:17
SPEAKER_03: To get to the screening room, you had to wend your way through a museum in the lobby, full of Langois' collection of movie cameras, costumes, and props.
16:25
SPEAKER_16: There was a kind of labyrinth where we could see step by step the evolution of the cinema.
16:33
SPEAKER_03: Oh, so so like every time you went to see a movie, you were reminded of the whole history of movies.
16:39
SPEAKER_16: Yes, yes.
16:40
SPEAKER_16: It was a kind of initiation as we enter a church.
16:48
SPEAKER_03: By the way, Moulet remembers the cost of entry at the Church of the Cinematech was interesting.
16:54
SPEAKER_03: 101 francs.
16:55
SPEAKER_03: One franc for the movie, a hundred for that museum.
16:59
SPEAKER_15: Because it means then that Langois is making people pay for an entrance to a museum exhibition and then showing films.
17:07
SPEAKER_15: And so he doesn't have to pay the taxes on film screenings that normal movie theaters have to.
17:13
SPEAKER_16: Yeah, yeah.
17:14
SPEAKER_16: It was a tricky to pay less taxes.
17:23
SPEAKER_16: It wasn't his gallery for five minutes.
17:26
SPEAKER_16: Yeah.
17:26
SPEAKER_16: But it was one for one more than two hours.
17:34
SPEAKER_03: Whatever the entrance be, for people like Millet, it was worth it.
17:38
SPEAKER_03: Because for them the cinema tech wasn't just a clubhouse.
17:40
SPEAKER_03: It was an unofficial film school.
17:42
SPEAKER_16: We were I think I think it's of movies.
17:46
SPEAKER_16: And we were I think it's with a good reason that I wanted to make film critics and to become a film director.
17:56
SPEAKER_16: So I had to know very well the great films.
18:00
SPEAKER_03: And at Rue de Messine, and later when Langois moved into a larger screening room at Rue d'Olm, they got a crash course.
18:08
SPEAKER_21: The big experience of the cinematic was the retrospective.
18:12
SPEAKER_21: When you can sit down every night for weeks, day after day, to see one or two or three movies of the same filmmaker, it's really truly extraordinary.
18:22
SPEAKER_21: And that happened to me with uh Mizoguchi, who was uh, you know, you want to cry because of the beauty of those movies.
18:37
SPEAKER_21: And nobody had seen most of those movies, some of them didn't even have subtitles.
18:43
SPEAKER_03: Actually, that was standard practice for Lengua, screening foreign films without subtitles.
18:48
SPEAKER_04: Which meant that for viewers who didn't know the language, they were mainly paying attention to the visual composition of the film.
18:56
SPEAKER_04: And that was a very important lesson for a lot of these young Sinaiasts to learn about the language of cinema, apart from the story and the dialogue.
19:04
SPEAKER_03: And with or without subtitles, many of their favorite foreign films were the ones that came from Hollywood.
19:10
SPEAKER_14: Oh, we do talk the same language, don't we?
19:13
SPEAKER_14: Sure, Bruno, we talk the same language.
19:27
SPEAKER_03: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawkes, at cafes after screenings, and in the pages of the film magazine Caille du Cinema, Schroeder and his pals sang their praises endlessly.
19:38
SPEAKER_15: In fact, they get caricatured as Hitchcoco Oxyens, so Hitchcock Hoxiens, right?
19:45
SPEAKER_15: So it's not just that they like Hollywood, but in particular, I have Hitchcock and Hawkes.
19:50
SPEAKER_03: They're really into Hitchcock and Hawks.
19:52
SPEAKER_15: They're really, really into them.
19:54
SPEAKER_03: Example, Luc Moulet's first film, Brigitte a Brigitte, straight up swipes shots from this movie, Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.
20:01
SPEAKER_14: Are you trying to tell me you maniac?
20:04
SPEAKER_14: But guy, you wanted it.
20:06
SPEAKER_14: We planned it on the train together, remember?
20:08
SPEAKER_03: And for Schroeder, Hawk's flicks like His Girl Friday, about hard-bitten newspaper men getting the job done, would influence everything he did.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: Press room, huh?
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Hello, Sarge McHugh talking.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Hold the line, will you?
20:22
SPEAKER_00: What?
20:23
SPEAKER_00: Hello.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: No, I told you this the press room, the criminal courts building.
20:26
SPEAKER_21: Hoax, especially.
20:28
SPEAKER_21: I saw all his movies, and you know, I learned a lot because uh they were not fancy, they were not trying to make beautiful shots.
20:37
SPEAKER_21: They were at the height of men.
20:39
SPEAKER_21: They were talking about men, and the man who was making them knew what he was talking about.
20:44
SPEAKER_14: Well, what do you gotta do?
20:45
SPEAKER_14: Get the governor on the phone.
20:46
SPEAKER_14: I can't.
20:47
SPEAKER_14: Why not?
20:48
SPEAKER_14: Can't locate him is out fishing.
20:49
SPEAKER_14: How many places to fish are there?
20:51
SPEAKER_14: Well, at least two, the Atlantic and Pacific.
20:53
SPEAKER_14: All right, that simplifies it, doesn't it?
20:54
SPEAKER_14: Get him on the phone.
20:56
SPEAKER_21: He was talking about the world he had lived in, about sinks that he knew.
21:01
SPEAKER_21: And uh for me, uh, I started feeling that, and it was very important for me.
21:06
SPEAKER_03: Movies about the world they lived in.
21:09
SPEAKER_03: That's a pretty good description of the kind of films Cinematech regulars started making.
21:14
SPEAKER_03: And they were like nothing France had seen before.
21:19
SPEAKER_03: Langois' disciples start a revolution in the cinemas, and then set the stage for another one outside his cinema.
21:26
SPEAKER_03: All that in just a minute.
21:27
SPEAKER_03: Stay with us.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: And here's something you can look forward to discovering in October in partnership with.
22:00
SPEAKER_03: With the Cinematech Francaise, Moobie is publishing this gorgeous art book.
22:04
SPEAKER_03: It's called The Faust Bible: The Making of F.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: W.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: Murnow's Masterpiece.
22:09
SPEAKER_03: The title sort of speaks for itself.
22:11
SPEAKER_03: This is a visual diary of 400 photographs and illustrations documenting the production of Murnow's 1926 silent classic Faust.
22:19
SPEAKER_03: But check this out for a story.
22:21
SPEAKER_03: This thing was compiled by members of Murnow's crew a hundred years ago.
22:26
SPEAKER_03: They gave it to them, and then it went missing for years.
22:30
SPEAKER_03: People thought it was just lost thanks to World War II.
22:33
SPEAKER_03: But then the Cinematech rediscovered it, they restored it, and now Movie Editions is publishing it for the first time ever.
22:40
SPEAKER_03: It comes out October 17th.
22:42
SPEAKER_03: This is a beautiful object to behold.
22:44
SPEAKER_03: It's a big piece of cinema history.
22:46
SPEAKER_03: We are going to launch its release on that day, October 17th, with a hundredth anniversary screening of Faust at the Cinematech, featuring a live score performed by Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabri.
22:58
SPEAKER_03: So if you're in Paris, lucky you, you should go to that.
23:01
SPEAKER_03: We are also going to have screenings at Munich's Film Museum München, October 25th, and at the Academy Museum here in LA where I live, November 1st.
23:09
SPEAKER_03: We've got all that info, so you don't have to memorize it.
23:12
SPEAKER_03: We got links, how and when to get tickets, how to pre-order the book, all that in the show notes of this episode.
23:18
SPEAKER_03: Go check it out.
23:20
SPEAKER_03: Speaking of this episode, let's get back to it.
23:25
SPEAKER_03: So it's the late 50s in Paris.
23:28
SPEAKER_03: The Cinemate Francaise has moved from its first screening room to a bigger one on the Rue Dolme.
23:33
SPEAKER_03: And the critics and filmmakers who've been binging on Hitchcock and Hawks at these theaters have embarked on a humble campaign.
23:41
SPEAKER_03: Just to reinvent French cinema, so that it did not sound like this.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: That's a wedding scene from Le Rouge et le Noir, a costume drama set in the 19th century.
24:00
SPEAKER_03: And it's a classic example of what was called quality cinema.
24:03
SPEAKER_03: Lavish productions, mostly shot on studio sets, and which a lot of times were based on classic novels.
24:14
SPEAKER_03: For years, these had been the crown jewels of France's film industry, movies said to be beyond criticism.
24:21
SPEAKER_15: But for the cinema tech crew, quality cinema, which was the kind of buzzword of post-war French cinema, becomes an insult.
24:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sometimes they even call it cinema de papa, daddy cinema.
24:34
SPEAKER_03: Instead, in the late fifties and early sixties, a lot of the new breed make films that sound like this.
24:50
SPEAKER_03: This is the Carriere de Suzanne, Suzanne's career, directed by Eric Roomer, produced by a young Barbé Schroeder, and shot in grainy black and white on location, in sidewalk cafes, student apartments, and dance clubs.
25:09
SPEAKER_03: In 1958, a journalist named Francois Giraud had coined a term to describe the post-war generation in France.
25:15
SPEAKER_03: Now it got applied to this new kind of filmmaking.
25:50
SPEAKER_03: Also, unlike Daddy's cinema, Schroeder remembers lots of these flicks were shot fast and cheap.
25:57
SPEAKER_21: We had so little money that no one can understand how little it was.
26:03
SPEAKER_21: La carrière de Suzanne was 52 minutes.
26:06
SPEAKER_21: And I am sure, I guarantee you, we didn't use more than 60 minutes of negative.
26:13
SPEAKER_21: When we were shooting at a cafe, we would ask friends to come to sit as uh extras because we needed them to sit at the same place for more than an hour, but we didn't have money to pay for extras.
26:28
SPEAKER_21: So people they pay for their own coffee in those scenes.
26:33
SPEAKER_21: But the cost cutting paid off.
26:35
SPEAKER_15: You needed a permit to shoot a feature-length film, they just don't get permits.
26:40
SPEAKER_15: They just shoot, they just make movies.
26:42
SPEAKER_15: And those movies end up being really successful.
26:44
SPEAKER_15: So like Francois Truffaut's 400 coup wins the best director award at Cannes in 1959.
26:51
SPEAKER_15: And as soon as that happens, everyone wants a part in making them.
26:55
SPEAKER_15: They're cheaper to make, and you're gonna make more money off of them if they are successful.
27:00
SPEAKER_21: No, no, it was a big revolution from one year to the next.
27:03
SPEAKER_21: Let's say in two years, everything changed.
27:07
SPEAKER_21: All the big uh established directors, they couldn't find the money to make more movies.
27:13
SPEAKER_21: Everybody producer wanted to produce a new wave director.
27:17
SPEAKER_03: And increasingly, everybody wanted to hang at the new wave's spiritual home.
27:22
SPEAKER_15: More people and more famous people start to come to the cinematech.
27:27
SPEAKER_15: Longwa often has directors coming through, actors, as well as a larger, kind of anonymous public.
27:34
SPEAKER_15: A lot of the kind of student population of the Latin Quarter will just come.
27:37
SPEAKER_15: So it loses that insider sense that it had during the occupation and then afterwards, and becomes much more of a, it's still a private institution, but it becomes much more of a public space.
27:48
SPEAKER_03: Soon the Cinematech landed an upgrade befitting a public space, a second screening room and a bigger museum in the grand state-run Palais de Chailleaux, right across from the Eiffel Tower.
27:58
SPEAKER_03: For Langois, it was a dream come true.
28:02
SPEAKER_03: But it also set the stage for the craziest chapter in the Cinematech saga, what would come to be known as L'affaire Langois.
28:11
SPEAKER_15: The Langois Affaire, it seems like explodes in 1968, but this type of thing could have happened at any moment in the history of the Cinematech.
28:21
SPEAKER_15: Because if you read Laurent Menoni's history of the Cinematic Française, it is riddled with bureaucrats saying, Henri Langois is the worst administrator we have ever seen.
28:32
SPEAKER_15: We do not know what to do with him.
28:34
SPEAKER_15: We give him all this money, and we don't know where it goes.
28:37
SPEAKER_15: Already in 1948, people are complaining about Langois as an administrator.
28:41
SPEAKER_15: But in 1968, the things that they really reproach him, so he's been getting more and more money from the state, but there is no inventory of the archives.
28:51
SPEAKER_15: So so papers, documents, film sets, artifacts, costumes, they can't even tell you what they have.
28:58
SPEAKER_15: And Langois won't let anyone see the notebooks because he doesn't want people to know what he has.
29:03
SPEAKER_03: And then Now, why why do you think that is?
29:06
SPEAKER_03: Is it just because you know he lived through the Nazi occupation and it's like the fewer people that know where the stuff is, the better I can protect it?
29:13
SPEAKER_15: I think so.
29:14
SPEAKER_15: I mean, in some part he's uh deeply concerned that the state is just gonna take everything away from him.
29:19
SPEAKER_15: And it's it's right he did live through a period where the state did do that.
29:22
SPEAKER_15: But I think it's also personal.
29:24
SPEAKER_15: I think that he's a very complicated human.
29:26
SPEAKER_15: And you see him as this kind of model of a certain type of French administrator where everything must depend on him and him alone.
29:33
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Well, another French administrator didn't think it was wise to depend on Langois alone.
29:38
SPEAKER_03: France's Minister of Cultural Affairs, the name of André Malraux.
29:45
SPEAKER_03: He's a weird choice of villain for this story.
29:48
SPEAKER_03: He was a war hero too.
29:49
SPEAKER_03: He was an author, he helped land the cinematic its space in the Palais de Chailleau.
29:53
SPEAKER_03: And in a way, he's the guy who made the new wave even possible.
29:58
SPEAKER_04: One of the things that Malraux wanted to do when he came into office in 1958 was to help the French film industry, which he felt was struggling.
30:06
SPEAKER_04: So Malroux did two things about that, which were very important in the history of French cinema.
30:11
SPEAKER_04: One was that he sent Truffaut's first movie, 400 Blows, to Cannes, where it won a prize.
30:17
SPEAKER_04: And 400 blows is sort of the first new wave, one of the first new wave movies.
30:21
SPEAKER_04: And that was Malroux who made that possible.
30:23
SPEAKER_03: And then he created the state system that basically subsidizes French filmmaking, even today.
30:28
SPEAKER_04: So it's not that he he did a lot for the French New Wave, it's not that he didn't get it, but he I think didn't understand the importance of the cinema tech and that whole culture.
30:38
SPEAKER_04: Which might explain what happened next.
30:40
SPEAKER_21: Very simple.
30:41
SPEAKER_21: We were very close to Langlois, and suddenly we learned from one day to the other that a minister of culture, I think it was Malraux, uh, had fired uh Langlois because they had decided that he was too eccentric, he was not and they started accusing him of not keeping the films uh safely or something, and they fired him just like that.
31:07
SPEAKER_03: His replacement?
31:08
SPEAKER_03: Pierre Barbin, a little known festival organizer.
31:11
SPEAKER_03: The blowback from the film world was fierce.
31:18
SPEAKER_03: Francois Truffaut himself, with fellow New Wave superstar Jean-Luc Godard, appeared in a short that got played in art houses all over France.
31:32
SPEAKER_03: It's thanks to Henri Langois.
31:35
SPEAKER_03: And then he tells audiences to join the Cinematek Support Committee.
32:00
SPEAKER_04: And then actors, Jane Fonda, Peter O'Toole, Bridget Bardot, and then just famous people Roland Barth, Samuel Beckett, Drum McCapote, Picasso, Jean-Paul Sark, uh Susan Sontag, Pauline Cale, Norman Mailer.
32:17
SPEAKER_03: You getting the picture?
32:19
SPEAKER_03: And Luc Moulet remembers some directors sent more than a signed petition.
32:23
SPEAKER_16: Sending telegrams to Malraux that if Languard was removed, they would take back their films from Cinematic.
32:33
SPEAKER_16: When it was Chaplin, Hitchcock, or uh Wells.
32:38
SPEAKER_03: Wait, so you're saying Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Wells all wrote telegrams saying, like, you reinstate Langois, or we will take our movies out of the Cinematech archives?
32:47
SPEAKER_16: Yes, I saw that.
32:48
SPEAKER_16: Because Truffaut contacted many people, and it was easy to have the whole world against Barber.
32:56
SPEAKER_03: And sure enough, in February 1968, what definitely seemed like the whole cinema world took to the street, right outside the Palais de Chailleau.
33:05
SPEAKER_21: So in those demonstrations, they were not only my generation that went immediately in the street, but every other generation that had been to the Cinematic was in the street also, and they were very famous people.
33:17
SPEAKER_21: Truffaut was there, uh, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, all those people.
33:22
SPEAKER_21: They were also film actress, Michel Simon was there.
33:26
SPEAKER_21: So it was really quite a big demonstration.
33:29
SPEAKER_03: There's footage of this protest.
33:30
SPEAKER_03: Sadly for me, all the sound's been lost.
33:32
SPEAKER_03: But trust me, it's crazy.
33:35
SPEAKER_21: I couldn't believe it because the police started knocking on us with sticks, but really like if we were uh public danger.
33:43
SPEAKER_21: And uh I could remember Claude Chabrol with his head completely bloody, and uh so it was so violent the response that we didn't understand.
33:54
SPEAKER_03: At another demonstration at the Cinematech offices, Luc Moulet remembers Godard taking a baton to the head.
34:01
SPEAKER_16: Yes, uh there were police, goddess, uh, spectacles were broken.
34:06
SPEAKER_16: It was a scandal.
34:08
SPEAKER_03: A director named Romain Goupil was there, and in a documentary called Henri Langois, Phantom of the Cinematec, he says this all made him and others see their country in a whole new light.
34:21
SPEAKER_03: That was all the proof we needed, he says.
34:24
SPEAKER_03: We were 15 or 16, that the state was a terrifying force capable of clubbing the best among us.
34:38
SPEAKER_03: The demonstrators were right, he says, simply because the cops were wrong, systematically wrong about everything, no matter what.
34:48
SPEAKER_03: After a couple of months of this, April 68, Henri Langois was reinstated.
34:54
SPEAKER_03: But that feeling that the state was systematically wrong was only growing.
35:00
SPEAKER_11: France, May 1968, a nation of strikes of violence, a country paralyzed across its length and breadth.
35:07
SPEAKER_03: In May 68, student and labor demonstrations erupted all over the country.
35:12
SPEAKER_03: And there's plenty of recordings of what that sounded like.
35:15
SPEAKER_13: In Paris, it was a night of wild disorder.
35:18
SPEAKER_03: It's a major moment in French history, and some will tell you the Langois affair helped kick it off.
35:24
SPEAKER_03: In fact, one of the May 68 organizers, a guy named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had actually been there at the Cinematech protests.
35:31
SPEAKER_03: Barbé Schroeder figures that's why the cops had gone crazy.
35:34
SPEAKER_21: We didn't understand that actually the leaders of May 68 had decided to infiltrate our manifestation and to use it to advance their cause in trying to use our anger to add it to their anger.
35:50
SPEAKER_21: So we had the May 68 treatment just because we we love Langlois in the cinema.
35:57
SPEAKER_03: Others doubt folks like Bendit intended to use the Cinematech protests as some kind of prelude for their own protests.
36:04
SPEAKER_15: I don't think so.
36:05
SPEAKER_15: May '68 was a long time in the works.
36:08
SPEAKER_15: Daniel Cohn Bendit, who has made a career of being a kind of student protester from 68, um, he's there at the Langlois protests.
36:18
SPEAKER_15: Why is he there?
36:19
SPEAKER_15: Well, he probably heard it was happening and showed up because these types of people showed up for any protests against the government.
36:26
SPEAKER_15: So I don't know if they like directly hijacked it.
36:29
SPEAKER_03: But could it have been an inspiration for the May 68ers?
36:32
SPEAKER_03: A signal that protests against the state might actually work?
36:35
SPEAKER_04: Yes, I do think that's possible.
36:37
SPEAKER_04: I think the ethos is slightly different.
36:39
SPEAKER_04: But I do take your point that seeing that kind of protest take place in February and March might have made some people who were present for that feel that way about the street demonstrations that happened in May.
36:51
SPEAKER_03: That it's like their first taste of revolution, in a way.
36:54
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
36:55
SPEAKER_03: Of course, the other difference, though, is that the you know Langwais demonstrations were successful and May 68 really wasn't.
37:01
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't.
37:02
SPEAKER_04: It just it went up in thin air.
37:03
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it lasted a month and then it was over.
37:05
SPEAKER_03: It's harder, it turns out, to uh change a country than it is to change the head of a movie theater.
37:12
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
37:14
SPEAKER_03: And in the wake of the Langua affair, it also turned out to be harder to run the cinematech.
37:20
SPEAKER_15: So the state says, fine, like you can have Langua back.
37:24
SPEAKER_15: He can do the cultural programming, we won't fund you.
37:27
SPEAKER_15: Basically, Langwa is like back at square one with very little funding, trying to keep the cinematech going.
37:34
SPEAKER_15: And by 1971, people aren't that into the cinematech anymore.
37:39
SPEAKER_15: Often the films that are supposed to be shown don't end up being shown because the archives are such a mess they can't find them.
37:45
SPEAKER_15: Um, Langwais is trying to make ends meet, so he's flying back and forth to Montreal to teach film history classes there.
37:58
SPEAKER_03: Around this time, 1974, Langois won an honorary Oscar.
38:03
SPEAKER_03: In his speech, he thanked Hollywood for making the movies that inspired generations of French artists.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: This is the reason I like so much the film America and likes so much.
38:14
SPEAKER_03: He died three years later, age 62.
38:18
SPEAKER_03: The happier news?
38:19
SPEAKER_03: Eventually, the government reinvested in the cinematech.
38:22
SPEAKER_03: Nowadays it's housed in a building designed by Frank Geary, and the collection's always being cataloged and restored.
38:28
SPEAKER_03: Every now and then, when they find a film that was incorrectly labeled by Langois, it's hard to know whether it's because it is haphazard archiving or if you've done it on purpose.
38:37
SPEAKER_03: To hide it from the Nazis.
38:43
SPEAKER_03: And the Cinematech still screens films, though I think it's fair to say it's more of a respected national institution than a hotbed for revolution.
38:51
SPEAKER_03: Of course, today, does anyone really think there can ever again be theaters like the original Cinematech?
38:58
SPEAKER_17: I do.
38:58
SPEAKER_17: You know, I actually think it is starting, to be honest.
39:01
SPEAKER_03: That's my friend Amy Nicholson.
39:03
SPEAKER_03: She writes about movies for the New York Times.
39:05
SPEAKER_03: And by way of example, she told me about a newish screening room run by a hip fashion brand that on the surface couldn't seem less Lengua-esque, but which deploys some very Lengua practices.
39:16
SPEAKER_17: There's this movie theater here in Los Angeles uh called The Braindead.
39:20
SPEAKER_17: And they like every night they just program whatever they want to.
39:24
SPEAKER_17: Like it could be, you know, some sort of Polish sexual fairy tale, or it can be a French silent movie from the 60s.
39:32
SPEAKER_17: They when they show trailers for movies, half the time the trailers don't even have English on them or subtitles.
39:37
SPEAKER_17: They've created a vibe at The Braindead where if you're cool, you just show up and you don't need to even know what the movie is.
39:43
SPEAKER_03: Any of that ring a bell?
39:45
SPEAKER_03: So should this.
39:46
SPEAKER_03: When I talked to Daniel Gross, the guy who programs Braindead, and who by the way hadn't really heard of Langois, he told me one way he creates that addictive vibe.
39:54
SPEAKER_18: I never want to show the same movie twice.
39:57
SPEAKER_18: I never want to repeat myself for at least the first few years.
40:01
SPEAKER_18: And I guess the reason is that everything should feel like an event, everything should feel special and unique, and like just like a one-time chance.
40:11
SPEAKER_03: Without even knowing it, he's taken pages right out of the Rue de Messine playbook.
40:16
SPEAKER_03: And you know what?
40:17
SPEAKER_03: It still works.
40:21
SPEAKER_03: I popped into Braindead on a Friday night for a screening of an early Akira Kurosawa movie called Stray Dog.
40:31
SPEAKER_03: Now I studied Kurosawa in film school and I'd barely heard of this movie.
40:35
SPEAKER_03: Even so, there were 50 young people in the seats, enough to have packed the cinema tech back in the day.
40:41
SPEAKER_03: I talked to a group of college kids in the lobby, they'd never heard of the movie either.
40:45
SPEAKER_03: But they traveled from Pomona, over an hour away, to check it out.
40:53
SPEAKER_03: This is West Hollywood, so when the film's over, there's no last metro to miss, and most of these people probably won't be walking home.
41:00
SPEAKER_03: But it's a long drive back to Pomona.
41:03
SPEAKER_03: Between here and there, who knows what they might think to themselves about what they want to do with their lives.
41:20
SPEAKER_03: And that's our encore episode of the Movie Podcast for this week.
41:24
SPEAKER_03: If you haven't, scroll back and check out our whole season about movie theaters that made movie history.
41:29
SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, get ready for season 12 coming in November.
41:31
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna tell you some amazing stories about artists who made great films despite their government's best efforts to stop them.
41:39
SPEAKER_20: This guy wrote it from jail, and I think that is what really makes somebody really be not kidding, and there is no fiction.
41:46
SPEAKER_20: When you are on those conditions and you are writing your life and your pain from jail, and you direct the film from jail, mean that film has that X-ray of a human soul integrated there.
42:00
SPEAKER_03: We'll be featuring guests like that guy, the great Alejandro Ignaitu.
42:04
SPEAKER_03: Follow us so you don't miss it.
42:05
SPEAKER_03: You can also follow me on Threads or Instagram at RicoGalliano.
42:09
SPEAKER_03: That is Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O.
42:12
SPEAKER_03: We can geek out on our favorite new wave films over there.
42:15
SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, let's roll credits.
42:16
SPEAKER_03: This episode was hosted, written, and edited by me, Rico Galliano.
42:19
SPEAKER_03: Kira McNif is our producer, along with assistant producer Kat Kowalzik.
42:23
SPEAKER_03: Beth Schiff was our booking producer for this episode, mastering by Stephen Cologne.
42:27
SPEAKER_03: Our original music is composed by Martin Ostwick.
42:30
SPEAKER_03: Thanks this week to Abby McNeil, Michael Ginno, and everyone at the Bime Theater and Braindead Studios.
42:36
SPEAKER_03: This show is executive produced by me along with F.H.
42:38
SPEAKER_03: Aquarell, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Taka.
42:41
SPEAKER_03: And finally, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the movies we talk about on this very program.
42:46
SPEAKER_03: Subscribe to MOBI at MUBie.com.
42:49
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for listening.
42:50
SPEAKER_03: Go watch the movies.
42:51
SPEAKER_03: Viva la cinema.