AFTER THE REVOLUTION.("The Dreamers")(Movie Review)

The Langlois Affair began on February 9, 1968. That was the day when Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque Francaise, which he had established, in the mid-thirties, with his friend Georges Franju, and dedicated to preserving and exhibiting movies from all periods and countries, was relieved of his position and replaced by a man named Pierre Barbin. Barbin was an obscure and relatively inexperienced film-festival organizer, and Langlois was a culture hero, a status recognized even by his adversaries. One of the men who engineered his dismissal, Pierre Moinot, called him "a ragpicker of genius." Langlois was also, as it turned out, a fox, and his confrontation with French officialdom is one of the great stories of a year whose meaning, like the meaning of 1789 and the meaning of 1848 and, someday, probably, the meaning of 2001, is a forever deepening mystery, even for--especially for--the people who lived through it.

Pierre Moinot's description was not unjust. Film stock is famously perishable, and for many years movies were considered, even by the companies that made them, disposable commodities. 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 "Napoleon" (1927) survives. Langlois contrived to keep the Cinematheque going during the Nazi Occupation, when American movies and most film societies were banned; and, after the Liberation of Paris, the Cinematheque's tiny, sixty-seat screening room, on the Avenue de Messine, became the premier repertory house in France. Sartre and Beauvoir were habitues; so were Leger, Braque, Gide, and Georges Pompidou. And so were the cinephiles of the postwar generation--Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol. The Cinematheque is where the New Wave was born.

Langlois was a scavenger, and he had a scavenger's regard for ethical and personal decorum. In the beginning, he stored films in his bathtub, a practice that (as one historian, Herman Lebovics, has noted) gives an accurate measure of his commitment both to collecting and to hygiene. No one knew exactly how he obtained all of the films that ended up in his possession, or where they were stored. His reputation for obsessiveness was his principal business asset; for many years, people entrusted their films to him because they believed that he would protect them, if called upon, to the death.

Then came the Fifth Republic. When Charles de Gaulle took office as President of France, in 1959, he created a new Ministry of Culture and appointed his old comrade Andre Malraux (who had been a minister in de Gaulle's brief first government, in 1945-46) to head it. Malraux was a culture hero, too, though of a very different stripe. His celebrity was the public kind: as a prize-winning novelist; as a tank commander in the French Army and, after escaping from the Germans, an officer in the Resistance; as an art historian; and as an almost comically indefatigable promoter of French culture. One of his first acts as Minister of Culture was to create the avance sur recettes, a system of state subsidy that helped finance many of the movies that made the nineteen-sixties a period of renaissance for French film: "Last Year at Marienbad," "Cleo from 5 to 7," "Jules and Jim," "Diary of a Chambermaid," "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," and "Belle de Jour." Also "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "A Man and a Woman," and "King of Hearts."

Administration was not among Malraux's many talents. He seems to have been persuaded by people like Moinot, the director of Arts and Letters in his own ministry, that the Cinematheque and its enormous collection had become too important to be left in the hands of a secretive, overweight, and badly groomed bohemian like Langlois. Langlois's administrative gifts were not great, either. He was accustomed to operate in a culture of personal loyalty based on common loyalty to an idea, the idea of cinema, and he was not disposed to answer to some bureaucrat for his expenses. He was not inclined to reveal the full extent of his collection, either, since not every movie's provenance could bear the light of day. Serious friction between Langlois and the government began with the opening of a big new auditorium for the Cinematheque, made possible by Malraux, at the Palais de Chaillot, on the Right Bank, in 1963. The new facilities were part of a government plan to convert the Cinematheque from a coterie club into a national institution, but Langlois was not converted along with it, and by the winter of 1968 the ministers had had enough. Barbin was inserted as director, the locks were changed, and vague promises of an advisory role for Langlois were duly uttered. The Gaullists must have imagined that movie lovers would approve the changes; the idea, after all, was to give the Cinematheque a sounder political and financial foundation, not to close it down. The Gaullists were ...