French film critics and the Cannes Film Festival organizers can agree on one thing, Variety reports: Henry Langlois, the founder of the revered Cinematheque.
The Cannes Film Festival and Critics Week sidebar are putting aside their traditional rivalry to jointly present a film, Jacques Richard's docu "Henry Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque."The three-and-a-half-hour pic, about the life and times of the legendary creator of France's film archive and museum, will be screened out of competition on the morning of May 21.
[snip]
The story of Langlois and his struggles with the French state, which were a prelude to the mass protests that spilled over and paralyzed the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, are a central part of French film lore. Some 65 talking heads appear in the docu, ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Jack Valenti, who presented Langlois with an Oscar in 1974 for his work preserving films.
The cinetrix would argue that the 1968 protest sequences in Bertolucci's The Dreamers are by far the best thing about that film. Still, it's a toss-up: sit through the beginning of Bertolucci's self-indulgent celebration of juvenile solipsism or sign up for 210 minutes of talking heads. I mean, La Maman et la Putaine is that long, but in Eustache's film at least people are constantly naked and/or smoking.
