Comics needs an Henri Langlois.
As collectors, most comics geeks have nothing on Langlois. I don’t care how many storage units you have. I know the longboxes block the closet. But from the ‘30s through the ‘70s, back in the days when a single film could take up several cans and a couple square feet of space, Langlois and his wife accumulated and preserved over 60,000 films, using primarily their own money, creating out of his collectors’ obsession the institution known as the Cinémathèque Francaise.
His scope was omnivorous: “People, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything.” He rescued numerous nitrate prints of silent movies and the only existing negative of The Blue Angel; he saved early Soviet cinema and “decadent” films from the Nazis; he stole film prints from the back rooms of movie houses that were about to destroy them (theaters destroyed their film prints to prevent piracy). For decades, he screened three films a day in his house in Paris, carefully selecting the films for the resonance of their justaposition. His screenings introduced the auteurs of the French New Wave to the American cinema that would define them and to the early European art cinema that would inspire them to transcend Hollywood.
But his archival impulse, and even his passion for sharing his films, are not why comics needs a Langlois. (Bill Blackbeard has all that mostly covered.) Comics needs a Langlois because of his particular inspired belief, poetic, imaginative, and non-didactic, about how cinema’s history should inspire its future:
An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world.
An odd sentiment for an archivist – to “start from scratch, demolish accepted norms.” Especially an archivist so intent on screening and programming, whose model for training in cinema was to organize one’s life around watching films, to complete immerse oneself in cinematic heritage and in conversation with other people who are equally immersed. This is the man who comforted Buñuel after the disasterous premiere of El at Cannes (and who introduced the film to Lacan), the man selected to pin the Legion of Honor on Alfred Hitchcock’s lapel. When protests broke out after the French government shut down the Cinematheque in 1968 for bad bookkeeping, Godard took a punch from a policeman on Langlois’ behalf (it broke his glasses, not his face, but still…)
Leaud speaking to the protesting crowd, 1968
How can we reconcile the historian archiving the past with the poet advocating the genius’ new world? Langlois himself suggests the answer in a story he tells about his childhood experience viewing Mèliés’ 1899 film Jeanne d’Arc:
As a boy in Turkey, they told me Joan of Arc took Paris. Knowing my dad was posted there, when I saw Jeanne d’Arc, I believed he was living in Joan’s Paris. Told that was wrong, I began to imagine parallel Parises: Joan’s, my father’s, etc. Hence, in my somewhat odd view, time isn’t time: it’s space.
Although the concepts are surely related, Langlois is not describing the relation of time and space found in Chris Ware – Ware’s use of space to evoke time, to transform our sense of time, and to highlight both pointed and sequential continuity through time, is still ultimately an exploration of temporality and its effects: of an experience living in history. Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense.
This idea of “history in the present tense” — omnipresent history — is both very French and very characteristic of Langlois’ time and his circle of friends. Forming in the years after WWII, the idea was influenced not only by Surrealism and Dada but by Sartre and Levi-Strauss and Lacan and their project of reimagining realism without materialism – the bloody, painful materialism of the wars and their aftermath. Structuralism’s forgetting of “history in the past tense” was an effort to find inspiration and humanity despite that trauma, and the result of their efforts was a concept of history that serves human imagination rather than subordinating imagination to the dictates of history and materialist historical thinking.
This sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in the Museum of Cinema that Langlois assembled in the last decade of his life.
An exhibit room at the Musée du Cinema
Langlois’ curatorial choices, although rich with minute historical detail, were almost completely non-chronological and non-genealogical. He cared about establishing composite effects among the films and artifacts, emphasizing thematic contiguity, resonance and suggestion. The result was a Museum that was itself a work of art, not of history, an experience that inspired questions and curiosity rather than a lesson that offered canned, approved answers. The 2004 documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (from which these English translations of the Langlois quotes are taken) posits convincingly that the museum itself was as much the work of an “auteur” as any New Wave film.
Notions of resonance and suggestion and composite seem very at home in comics, even more so than film. Images accrue meaning through juxtaposition far more than in the dynamic cinema or even in prose text, which always retains at least some small echo of the temporality of spoken language. Langlois’ approach to history – never for its own sake but always in the service of imagination, not the trace of the past but the texture of the present, always pointing toward the future – is particularly inspirational as an antidote to nostalgic minutiae, the biggest obstacle to the troublemaker’s new world:
There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage – a film nerd – sits in the front row and writes down the credits. If you ask him whether it’s good, he’ll say something sharp. But that’s not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It’s incompatible with note-taking!
The documentary from which the quotes and stills in this essay were taken is worth every minute of the time spent watching it. It’s currently available on DVD and Netflix on Demand.
Thanks Caro!…
One of the persons that most influenced my life was João Bénard da Costa, the director of the Portuguese cinematheque for many years. He was highly influenced by Langlois… But I want to tell you a story (as told by João Bénard):
It was November 17, 1973 in the great auditorium of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The Fascist regime was still in power (the Portuguese revolution would take place April 24, 1974). The film being shown was _Rome, Open City_ by Roberto Rossellini. Langlois and Bénard were the curators of a series of shows to survey film’s history.
The censors prohibited the film, but, after negotiations and, since Rossellini himself would also come to Lisbon, they agreed to show it (Portugal’s image couldn’t be worst in the International media at the time, because of the colonial war, and the government must have thought that they didn’t need another scandal).
Big mistake, though!…
After an ominous silence during the projection of the film everybody jumped from their seats shouting “Bravo!” and “Down with Fascism!” for more than 10 minutes. Rossellini was overwhelmed, the government VIPs sneaked out of the auditorium. People were crying and hugging each other…
After the event Langlois said to Bénard that important things would be happening in the country soon. Bénard wanted to believe him, but, as any realist person at the time, he was skeptical…
After the revolution, a mere 5 months later, Langlois confessed: “You know?, silent film taught me a lot. It wasn’t the shouting that impressed me, but the people’s faces. The faces of the baddies and the faces of the goodies” […] “Le cinéma muet, le cinéma muet.”
So, if you want to be accurate in your political prognostics, follow Langlois and turn off the sound of your TV. Le cinéma muet! Le cinéma muet!…
I’m curious, Caro – have you seen Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma? What did you make of that? It seems to me a similar application of the same values, “emphasizing thematic contiguity, resonance and suggestion” specifically across the breadth of cinema, as transmitted via Godard’s particular filmic essay approach…
it would have to be “a” henri langlois, not “an”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_h
(sorry for the nitpicking.)
B-b-but David! It’s in English! (You think it’s really worse to imply the silent-H rather than risking “Hen-ree”?)
Jog, I have not seen the whole thing all the way through: I saw the first two (from the ’80s) in their entirety ages ago and have seen bits and pieces of the later ones. I need to watch the whole thing…
I agree it’s the same values, though, not just in HdC but throughout Godard’s work: I think he’d probably give Langlois credit for that “vision” of cinema. The documentary I link to quotes Godard as saying that Langlois “produced a way of seeing films.” I don’t think it was original to Langlois, though: I think it was emerging throughout the arts and philosophy in France in that period, and Godard is arguably its more skillful and creative exponent (he’s my favorite filmmaker; it’s easy for me to buy any argument like that.)
Domingos, what an absolutely extraordinary story. Anything I could say about it would diminish it – I’m so glad to have that glimpse into Langlois! You’ll have to tell us more about da Costa…
A fine piece, Caro, and what a great story, Domingos!
Just as a footnote, I thought I’d post the following from an interview with Chris Ware that I conducted recently:
“Our sense of having some importance is based on the fact that we don’t know where we’re going or how we’re going to die, and really, everything has already happened in the world, if you see it as a non-time-based entity. I don’t believe that time is actually happening; I think it is just a construction of our consciousness—we’re growing and our experience of life is simply our consciousness dealing with this. Our entire world is structured; if we knew what was going to happen in the future, we wouldn’t need ethics or moral structure. (Pause) I sound like an idiot.”
Good lord; he sounds like Alan Moore.
Good post. That doc is great. Our entire culture could benefit from an (I’m going with silent) Henri Langlois.
“Good lord; he sounds like Alan Moore.”
Or Bergson.
Not like Bergson, surely…Bergson believes consciousness and the experience of time IS “real” time. Notions of simultaneous/Einsteinian 4-dimensional “everything there” time were anathema to him. They represent the theorization/intellectualization of time, as opposed to the “experience” of it. Experience in time trumps all for Bergson– and Heidegger (?- still trying to figure him out on these issues).
caro: well, i know your text is in english, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you want your readers to internally pronounce “henri” the french way, then the h should be aspirated & thus treated as a consonant. of course, it’s your text & it doesn’t matter that much, other than to francophones like myself.
wait, am i really using more than 30 seconds of my time to nitpick on the internet about an extremely minor linguistic point 99% of your readership will have nothing to do with? gee, it looks like i am. sorry, back to your regular disputes, i’ll be watching somewhere in the back. strong article by the way, as usual on HU.
Well, the resemblance to the thoughts of Alan Moore are not coincidental, because they share a source. here’s more from the interview:
“…early on I thought about that a lot more and I thought about comics as sort of a fourth dimension of time spread out and all sorts of art school nonsense. I don’t know, I read a lot of books about these crazy Victorians, like there was kind of a fad in the 1890s with the fourth dimension, and that book, Flatland—I don’t know if anybody’s ever read it or not, there was this crazy guy named Charles Howard Hinton, who claimed he could envision the fourth dimension and see himself from a child to an old man all at once, but basically he was just using it as an excuse to like screw a bunch of his friends’ wives, and he advocated polygamy as some way of seeing the fourth dimension… obviously, he was a genius (Laughter).”
LOL David. The correction’s fine! I was just assuming most of the readers weren’t francophonic at all, and would completely Anglicize it without the “an.” The difference between the aspirated h and mute h is lost to my ear most of the time (although I start to catch it when I watch a lot of French movies at a stretch!) let alone my palate. It’s one of those things that I know exists intellectually but have no real ownership of. Perhaps being reminded of it will improve the situation!
Ware’s mix of the sci-fi “everything has already happened in the world” with the neurobiological “just our consciousness dealing with it” is bizarre! It’s definitely not structuralism though, that I can see…do you agree, Matthias or do you see parallels I’m overlooking?
Matthias, our posts crossed! Flatland was my favorite book for awhile as a kid. HA. (It got supplanted by The Phantom Tollbooth, I think.
Eric, I don’t know how much effort we should spend on that Ware quote, but:
For Bergson, the present is an emergence out the cumulative past (he uses that cone diagram). The present is all there is, with memory contributing to the experience of time passing (duration). Abstract time (used in science; the kind that’s theoretically reversible, like an equation) is what’s constructed. To me, that’s what it sounded like Ware was getting at.
Charles, just catching the earlier post: thanks. I’m glad someone else has seen the doc and can attest to its fantasticness! Everybody with Netflix should watch it right away!
It may be worth noting that for the structuralists, both “historical” time and abstract time are “scientific”, in the sense of materialist. The “non-scientific” is the idealist concept.
Re Eric’s comment, the structuralist idea of time does come from Heidegger (and Hegel) by way of Kojeve, but is more an philosophization of the Saussurean distinction between diachronic and synchronic linguistics. But Kojeve’s Heidegger is almost unrecognizable as Heidegger I think, so I have absolutely no idea how to fit all this into your point.
caro: actually the difference between aspirated & silent should certainly be mute to your ear, as well as mine or anyone’s, because there is in fact no difference, at least when you pronounce the word in isolation. the difference is in the transition from the previous word. eg. le hasard but l’habitude. (as for knowing which h is aspirated & which is silent, there’s no logical rule, you have to look in the dictionary (or wikipedia). it’s french so it has to be charmingly arbitrary & complicated, right?) (argh, i did it again, dammit.)
True enough: I am indeed hearing the transition.
Interestingly, though, this is one of the examples Saussure uses to articulate the problems of dealing with spelling in linguistics — laying out the argument about the relationship of speech and writing that Derrida will target in the work on arche-writing in Grammatology that we were talking about just a couple of days ago!
I can’t figure out how to give a link to a passage in Google Books. It’s this book, and if you search for “deu haches” it pulls up the passage. (I looked for the French version and didn’t find it – I presume the search would work in both…)
Hey, looks like that link does actually take you right to it. Whaddya know.
Bergson’s kind of tricky on these issues in that his ideas change from book to book. Charles, you’re speaking of Matter and Memory (my favorite!), I think…but certain parts of Time and Free Will and, esp., Duration and Simultaneity contradict some parts of the Ware statement anyway. Bergson tends to attack those who view time “spatially” (including Einstein)…but I see your point. I think we see Ware saying different things, which is where the Bergson difference comes from.
Love Flatland!
These ideas about time aren’t structuralist. They arise more out of changes in physics and theoretical physics (and then intellectual/popular attempts to understand/apply them). Seeing time as a 4th dimension that is “already there” precedes Einstein (a big popular idea in the 1880’s, as Hinton and Abbott testify to), but is part of the theoretical/scientific run-up to Relativity. At least that’s how I’m choosing to understand it for the moment.
Moore, for instance, shows a vested interest in 4-D spacetime in Watchmen via Einstein/physics, long before he explicitly gets hooked into Hinton in From Hell. Comics represents time as space, of course, and can show us 4 dimensions “simultaneously” (through full-page polyptychs and the like). It then becomes somewhat “natural” for comics creators to take an interest in the links between their artform/aesthetics and philosophical/scientific notions such as these.
Ware and Moore like to break up their pages to shatter the sequential “progress” of time and reveal its multidirectionality or simultaneity–so, not so shocking that they sound similar. None of this has much to do with French film…about which I don’t know much. Sorry.
Hi Eric – that makes sense: I came up with sci-fi and neurobiology instead but it’s the same general corner of the forest. Definitely not structuralism. (We’ll see if Matthias agrees.)
I’m not terribly keen on philosophizations from science. I like my science to be materialist and my philosophy idealist (being as science is about matter, and philosophy about ideas). I suppose I don’t see the need to be philosophical about material things: that what science is for! (But I am also friends with scientists of various stripes, and married to one…so perhaps this is just protecting myself from looking like an idiot in my own living room.)
Eric,
“you’re speaking of Matter and Memory (my favorite!), I think…”
Yep. I haven’t read D&S or Time …, just Memory … and Creative Evolution.
BTW, I ordered that book you recommended. Let me know when yours comes out (I like your references, haha).
Y’know, I’ll announce Eric’s book on the blog. What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t make the occasional nepotistic announcement (there’s a comics connection since he talks about Maus, at least.)
And you’re right about the spatialization of time, which I didn’t pick up on from the first one. Ware’s kind of contradicting himself, it seems.
“first one” meaning “first quote.”
João Bénard da Costa (2/7/35 – 5/21/09) was the director of the Portuguese cinematheque since 1991 almost until he died, but he was an important part of the institution since 1980. Before that, as I wrote in my comment, he worked at the Gulbenkian Foundation directing the institution’s film activities.
I learned a lot about film at the cinematheque while I studied painting in Lisbon. João Bénard wrote very important essays about many great filmmakers in the Cinematheque’s catalogs: Mizoguchi, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Luis Buñuel, etc… His favorite film was Nicholas Ray’s _Johnny Guitar_.
I also like his texts in the Portuguese press a lot. Very personal reflexions on his life, films, opera, painting, Italy, etc…
He was one of those people with a classical (and Christian; he was a Christian leftist) education that are so hard to find nowadays. He used it in his criticism crossing references almost in a Warburgian way.
There’s not many info about him in English on the www, of course. I found a couple of blog entries:
http://tinyurl.com/38htf2w
http://tinyurl.com/3yxswaw
Here’s João Bénard being the great critic that he was:
http://tinyurl.com/3a4owp8
Since we’re speaking of space and time and film and comics…notice how film uses time to create the illusion of space, and comics use space to create the illusion of time?
When I was a student the big thing was to go to the Cinémathèque at Chaillot without the faintest notion of what would be showing.A good way to further one’s cultural education; And a challenging one, as the heirs of Langlois followed his lead by spurning both dubbing and sub-titles!
I’m surprised that no one mentioned Gilles Deleuze yet. I found his classes on the www:
http://www.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/
It’s no Deleuze, but I prattled on about Bergson, La Jetée, time travel, and space in comics a couple of years ago. It relates to the Ware quote, I guess.
Alex, did you get to see the museum while it was still intact? I looked for footage and couldn’t find any…I was really unhappy to learn from the documentary that it was gone!
Domingos, Eric, Charles: I found an interesting essay that talks about both Deleuze and Bergson here. I’m only familiar with the essay’s poststructuralist source material and not enough with the philosophical and phenomenological sources to evaluate it thoroughly, but the poststructuralist bits made sense to me.
It does give a small parallel between what Ware is saying and the poststructuralists: the idea that time is an illusion. But Ware implies that time is an illusion for materialist reasons, whereas wouldn’t the poststructuralists say that time is not materially an illusion, but that the accessbility of its materiality is the illusion? I guess that’s more Lacan…
I do think there’s always a difference between space and structure, at the philosophical level, that I did not make effectively in the original post. The root concept is “synchronic” — happening at the same time. The idea is that temporal events do not relate to each other in terms of “delta t”; they relate to each other in the same way that spatial objects do, held together by “forces” that are described as “logics.” Maybe sort of logic functioning to hold ideas together the same way gravity functions to hold objects together…
Althusser calls it “structural causality.” If I remember correctly the most effective explanation for me was the one in Jameson’s Political Unconscious.
Oy, that link does not work. The relevant bit starts on page 7, at the big heading I.
Hope to get to the reading list later today…I think it’s maybe worth pointing out for Flatland that, at least as I remember it, the ideas about time and the fourth dimension are pretty closely connected to theology; the idea (from Kant?) that there’s phenomenal time and then there’s eternity, which touches the phenomenal possibly but is still outside. It’s kind of interesting how that gets parsed through various sources and ends up with Ware arguing that time is vital for ethics (i.e. without time you wouldn’t need ethics), which is a kind of mirror image of where Kant is coming from (that is, the noumenal, or eternity, is actually the ethical, or at least the ethical is where eternity and the phenomenal coincide.)
Kant would say (maybe) that outside time is the ethical (maybe?); so to say you wouldn’t need ethics without time would be nonsensical. You can almost see time as a stain, a sin — which works with the garden of eden I think.
Anyway, maybe not especially relevant; but I do think there’s a half-hearted suggestion in flatland that the divine (or christ in particular) is a dimensional phenomena.
If you wanted to make Kant say things he wouldn’t say, you could argue that the aesthetic (as Caro says) makes past to present, and that that’s why it’s provisionally sacred — turning (at least metaphorically) past into present, and so giving you a glimpse of God.
“Maybe sort of logic functioning to hold ideas together the same way gravity functions to hold objects together…”
Which is a lovely metaphor because, of course, nobody actually knows how gravity works.
Begin pedantry.
I’m gonna make a pedantic quibble about this:
the “past to present” stuff is really Hegel, so yeah, Kant definitely wouldn’t say it!
End pedantry.
I should say, it might be Kant too. MY version of it is Hegelian, though…
Also, Flatland is online in its entirety here if anybody has never read it. It’s fairly sexist and definitely theological. Noah’s right, the relationship between theology and math is played off of in Continental Philosophy a lot, I think.
Hi, Caro. The museum is kind of in limbo now.
On the plus side, though, the Cinemathèque has quit its quaint but exiguous quarters at Chaillot for a magnificent building designed by the guy who did the Guggenheim at Bilbao, Geary.
Langlois’ inclusionist policy has had concrete repurcussions. In film restoration circles, it’s now axiomatic that all films must be accorded equal respect.
Hey…come to think of it, Hooded Utilitarian is pretty inclusionist.
Noah = comics’ Langlois (minus the filthy personal hygiene)?
“Noah = comics’ Langlois (minus the filthy personal hygiene)?”
You know nothing about my hygiene.
“Noah = comics’ Langlois (minus the filthy personal hygiene)?”
I love it! No wonder I like it here.
I think it’s worth noting, though, that although Langlois felt that all films were worth saving, he also held up Truffaut and Godard as examples, and they were perfectly willing to treat a film as a piece of shite if they thought it was a piece of shite. It’s just that they didn’t make discernments based on categories.
Langlois also had the attitude that if there was one great moment in a film, the whole film was worthwhile for that one moment – you just paid attention to the one moment and ignored the rest. It wasn’t that he did not make discernments; it was, as you say, that he was inclusive. He wanted to find things he loved more than he wanted to find things he hated, and he was open minded about where he would find things he loved. But he didn’t just love things indiscriminately.
I’m noticing belatedly that you said “film restoration circles.” I’m kind of ok with that — I mean, I guess there needs to be prioritization and there are finite resources, but I’m on board with the idea that there is value in archiving everything. Not all people will use the archives for the same reason.
Begin archive geek tangent:
That said, the archives I spend time in are notoriously bad at indexing and cataloguing, so there are these insane numbers of boxes with indexes that say things like “Office 45. Notebooks” or films that say little more than “Army film office number #####.” (Which only means someone from the Army made the film: I looked at one recently that turned out to be footage from inside Monsanto labs during animal testing on the effects of radioactivity, but it was just labeled with “Army” and a number…)
I’m ok with saving everything, but if you go that route, an actually descriptive description of what every thing becomes all the more important.
This is made all the worse by the fact that there’s no way to annotate the records, so no matter how many people look at the records, their information never actually makes it into the catalog. Archive needs a wiki.
End archive geek tangent.
Yeah…the hygiene is somewhat equivalent!
Deleuze wrote a good book about Bergson too, btw, entitled Bergsonism.
I too have prattled on about Bergson, time, space, and comics…although the prattlings are not online. I feel like Charles is my mysterious not-so-evil twin.
There’s a fun Derrida essay on time and Heidegger too, “Ousia and Gramme,” I think it’s called…maybe in _Spectres of Marx_?
Hey, Eric, he’s your brother…give us the scoop on Noah’s B.O.
Does it have the potential to equal the heroically noxious effluvium haloing Langlois?
Enquiring minds want to know!
I doubt I can really compete with the French, alas….
Hey Eric — Ousia et Gramme is in Margins of Philosophy. Re Noah’s point about Kant, Derrida also talks about space and time in the “Introduction to Husserl’s Origins of Geometry”:
It keeps going, but that start is on page 42 of the version on Google Books.
Argh. I’m actually reading Derrida on Kierkegaard at the moment, and reexperiencing the deep sense of not knowing what the hell he’s talking about.
Why should ideal space and time require a nonempirical historicity of the sciences of space and motion? What is a nonempirical historicity of the sciences anyway? I guess I see why transcendent space time opens an ahistoric metaphysics (it’s outside history — though when did Kant denounce that?) And I see why it leaves space for a historicist empirical science (science is in history) though not necessarily why you need to have transcendent space/time in order to make a way for it.
I have absolutely no idea! Too long ago, too much Kant…and I’ve never read any Husserl at all. Too bad Andrei’s not around – he’s really good at this stuff.
I think you’re supposed to consider the sense of being completely unmoored as part of the pleasure of reading Derrida. It’s like that business in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth talks about needing a husband who is smarter than she is (or something like that — I know that’s not quite the phrasing but that’s the way I remember it.)
Over on Suat’s thread, Charles Reece commented “I don’t go to Godard for his intellectual, critical, thinking, though. I wanted to respond but brought it over here, because it has so little to do with Suat’s post…
Charles, could I ask what you do go to Godard for? I think for me, the pleasure of Godard is very specifically an erotics of the mind, freed from (or at least banging at the walls of) The Prisonhouse of Language: the resistance to narrativizing the insights and containing them leaves me with this very sensual experience — but it’s still an experience of the idea. The criticality of it is therefore essential, much more so than even in the other New Wave directors. (Bunuel is similar, but he is not New Wave.) I think the sensuality of the idea is a very important element of the New Wave overall, but Godard is the master of it, and his work is where, for me, that perspective is the most vital to the enjoyment…