Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 1936, the world's first film archive, was an enormously curious and classically rumpled film aficionado who fought film's disposable status by saving everything. Joined by the equally eccentric Mary Meerson, over the course of 40 y

Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 1936, the world's first film archive, was an enormously curious and classically rumpled film aficionado who fought film's disposable status by saving everything. Joined by the equally eccentric Mary Meerson, over the course of 40 years Langlois hid thousands of films from the Nazis and championed the work of once-forgotten stars (Louise Brooks, Gloria Swanson) and American genre directors (Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray). The man who schooled Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol, helped make Paris the center of film culture.