Parlons cinéma or Les Anticours d’Henri Langlois is a group of short films, or, more precisely, chapters. Each chapter focuses on a filmmaker or important moments of one country or another or of one style or another, or a group of men whose activity was decisive at a certain time for the direction of Film. Yes, the direction of Film, not the direction of film. As opposed to taking us on a tour of his museum, in each chapter Henri Langlois takes us for a walk through the history of cinema, as if the scenery behind him were indifferent or as if it were a mysterious antechamber connected to a room that could tell as many wonderful stories as there are films to be screened. But it is not just the scenery that lacks solemnity, even the recording of what Langlois says is without formality. He walks, he sits down in one spot or another, he changes position,he glides from one space to another. (…) Langlois talks about what he finds. And what he found is nearly always cinema, and in every case it is something fundamental. His heroic undertaking of saving the largest amount possible of film prints, to protect them from the destructive hands of time, bad preservation conditions, the indifference of production companies, destruction or disappearance, instilled in him not only a keen sense of the precariousness of things but also an intense familiarity with the films, with their substance, their bright luster and loss of it, the reel’s rhythm, the flow of images filling one minute of projection time, with the cackling of the first audio tracks, the solemn sound effects of early films, the constant improvement of the sound of voices, the spatial position of the music behind the voices or in front of the background, the evolution of using color and its progressive alteration over time. This type of familiarity is above all physical knowledge of film. During the post-war period, by saving their films, Langlois proved to filmmakers that they were witnesses and artists of this terrible 20th century bent on cataloguing peoples, nations and races; they had no idea they were creating the quintessential form of modern art but were made aware of this fact because Langlois offered them an unexpected objective element: being able to show their films regularly.

Jean-Claude Biette, Tout se lie sur un autre plan, in La persistance des images, Cinémathèque Française, Paris 1996