Citizen Langlois is a portrait of the man who, as Edgardo Cozarinsky says, "saved the memory of the imaginary in the 20th century." Cofounder (with Georges Franju) of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois (1914-77) was a flamboyant and fanatical historian and archivist who devoted his life to saving films and supporting their creators. He was not above using a bathtub as a vault or engaging in the most unbureaucratic kind of finagling to indulge his passion, and in 1968 the French Government tried to fire him, an attempt greeted with outraged street protest. He was reinstated to continue his work as "the dragon guarding our culture" (Cocteau's words). Citizen Langlois conveys the charisma and mystery of this man who played an extraordinary public role but was ultimately very private and elusive. As Russell Merritt notes, it is not a film about collecting but about exile (Langlois left his native Smyrna in flames, Cozarinsky is an Argentinian exile) and the strategies used to cope with exile of all sorts: "Langlois finds in film and film restoration a landscape for exile-taking a film and making it whole again."