Bay Area Premiere!

(Le Fantôme d'Henri Langlois). This Thanksgiving PFA extends thanks to one of our great mentors, Henri Langlois (1914–1977), with the first Bay Area screening of a monumental new documentary on this larger-than-life figure in cinema history. Langlois was the cofounder (with Georges Franju) of the Cinémathèque Française in 1936 and for the next forty years was its presiding genius. Rescuing, collecting, preserving, and screening films known and unknown was a self-invented role that grew from a magnificent obsession into an international movement and gave courage to lovers of cinema worldwide (including those who founded PFA, where Langlois visited and lent support at its inception). Jacques Richard's three-and-a-half-hour film, itself a labor of love seven years in the making, “crucially matches the energy and passion Langlois himself embodied (in a) deep-dish account of (his) life and times” (Todd McCarthy, Variety).

How the perennially underfunded Cinémathèque came to be “an embassy, a safe haven for artistic freedom”-and why it needed to be-is the theme that weaves through Phantom. For Langlois is not only the man who rescues stray film cans only to find the forgotten genius of a Murnau or Keaton within; whose devoted volunteers are the likes of Simone Signoret, Lotte Eisner, and Musidora; whose spontaneous, creative, and ceaseless programming spawns the Nouvelle Vague. He also goes to wildly heroic lengths to secrete films away from the Nazis during the war; and “inspires André Malraux to dream” then bring the wrath of officialdom down on him, precipitating in April 1968 a dress rehearsal for May in the storming of the Cinémathèque.

What brings you to PFA week after week, season after season? If you answered film love, or “cinephilia,” do we have a film for you.