"Curators Are Idiots" - Henri Langlois

"Phantom Of The Cinematheque," a documentary about French Cinematheque founder Henri Langlois, opened a few weeks ago at the Film Forum on Houston during the month that Jeremy Blake and I spent in New York. By turns a cult of personality and a messy, ad hoc, nearly dysfunctional institution that gave early respect to a still new art form, the Cinematheque eventually became a global monument where censorhship became less possible and democratic freedoms were upheld. Before the Cinematheque, art had emanated top-down in France from whoever was currently in power. France's unregulated and underappreciated film industry combined with the newness of the art form itself marked the first time art and the producers of culture existed completely outside of French bureaucratic and institutional control.

The establishment of the Cinematheque by Langlois and its agenda-less agenda eventually piqued the interest of Andre Malraux, then France's Minister of Culture. The notorious student riots of 1968 were sparked in part by Malraux's decision to fire Langlois from his beloved Cinematheque. Watching a handful of handsome, stylish young New Wave directors create a massive stand off with the French police over a film museum, we understand that an important shift in culture had already occured, but as usual, artists were the first to announce it. Langlois and the children of the Cinematheque understood that art itself was the new government. While Langlois was reinstated due to the protests, the government's subsequent attempt to starve his institution out of being could not disguise the fact that film now had a bigger grip on the prevailing fantasy France had of itself than the state.

Langlois was a slatternly, obese man who managed by chaos and whim, but something of his personal style and the madness of his method kept the film medium and his institution open and iterative instead of devout and inert. "Performing a sort of triage on what should be saved--creating a hierarchy of preservation is just stupid." Langlois chastises himself in an on screen interview after having neglected to buy the Hollywood films of 1910's "vamp" Theda Bara. "Sifting through, deciding what art is, it's just vanity. Curators and bureaucrats are idiots, including myself." Indeed, today it's nearly impossible to view Theda Bara's work--of the more than 40 films she made from late 1914 through 1926, only three and a half remain.

The French government continued to attack Langlois for the rest of his life. He and his long suffering employees often worked without heat or electricity, Langlois went without shoelaces and held his pants up with an extension cord. The discomforts endured by these passionately dedicated employees reveal a singularly unsentimental "vita brevis, ars longa" philosophy underlying the Cinematheque's mission. One person interviewed in the film describes the great scholar and preservationist of German film Lotte Eisner meeting a fifteen year old homosexual filmmaker named Kenneth Anger and offering him one bit of career advice: "If you commit suicide," she said, "leave everything to the Cinematheque."
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2005/10/curators_are_id.html