La Cinémathèque française

About this place

A film institution in the Bercy district of Paris holding a museum of cinema, four screening rooms and one of the largest film archives in the world. The story of its founding is the reason film archives exist at all. Henri Langlois and Georges Franju started it in 1936, at a time when films were not kept: once a commercial run ended, prints were destroyed or melted down to recover the silver in the stock. Langlois collected them simply because he refused to let them be thrown away, storing them in his bath and under his bed in the early days. During the Nazi occupation he hid many prints that would have been seized or destroyed, among them films by Jewish directors and banned works. What survives of French silent cinema largely survives because of him. The place then became a school. The directors of the New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette — learned cinema by watching whatever Langlois screened each day, not at a film school. When the government tried to remove him in 1968, the protests that followed were called the Cinémathèque Affair and he was reinstated. Practical points: the museum is ticketed and screenings are ticketed separately. The building is by Frank Gehry. Most films screen in their original language with French subtitles — usually not English.