Rodrigues, Antonio

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Transmission at the Cinémathèques
Antonio Rodrigues
ABSTRACT
The relationship between Henri Langlois and João Bénard da Costa is at the heart of  the influence that the Cinémathèque 
Française exerted over the Portuguese Cinematheque, as well as of  the transmission and circulation of  ideas and programming 
models at play between both institutions. Commenting on some of  the characteristic traits of  both Langlois and da Costa, this 
essay also traces the evolution of  the Portuguese Cinematheque, founded in 1958. Langlois’s support was key during a period 
of  great economic hardship, under the directorship of  Manuel Félix Ribeiro, and further extended since da Costa became a 
regular collaborator. In particular, the article mentions the important retrospective dedicated to Roberto Rossellini in 1973, 
just before the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the dictatorship in Portugal in 25 April 1974. Furthermore, the author 
elaborates on the similarities and differences between both film programmers, and in particular analyses programmes based 
on the relationships or ‘secret links’ between films, from the early programmes created by Langlois in the 1930s to da Costa’s 
later programmes, such as ‘Lang in America’ (1983) and ‘Variations on Oz’ (1992). 
KEYWORDS
Henri Langlois, João Bénard da Costa, Portuguese Cinematheque, programming criteria, Auteur theory, film seasons, Roberto 
Rossellini, spectator.
ARTICLES · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 81-85
81
Henri Langlois (1914–77) was the real 
inventor of  the profession of  film programming 
and can also be considered the greatest film 
programmer, or at least the most influential. 
This probably has to do with the fact that he 
was also the greatest cinephile of  all times. 
Lnglois transformed hi passion for cinema in a 
way of  living and knew, better than anyone else, 
how to transmit it. This is why he wrote part of  
the history of  cinema: he taught to see because 
he enabled to see. Thanks to his programmes, 
the films mentioned in books, in the histories 
of  cinema and in the filmographies acquired a 
form of  reality. Langlois, who awoke so many 
vocations (for cinephiles, programmers, film-
makers) was a self-taught man, as so many 
generations of  cinephiles who succeeded him 
– even those who held institutional positions as 
programmers had often undertaken studies in 
other fields at university. One of  his adversaries, 
MoMA’s Richard Griffith, criticised him in 
privately saying, ‘he is not an archivist, or a 
historian, he is only... an enthusiast!’ When he 
found out about the comment, Langlois found 
very funny that enthusiasm was considered 
a negative quality and saw in this argument a 
justification of  his own despise for his colleague 
at MoMa (ROUD, 1983: 133). Langlois wasn’t 
someone to prompt consensus, he rather stirred 
up unconditional friendships or lethal hatred. 
And Langlois himself  divided the world up 
between friends and enemies, people with 
whom he shared affinities, and whom he trusted 
and others that he mistrusted. Naturally it was 
possible for a friend to become an enemy, but 
the opposite was more unlikely. With some, he 
could be very generous, but he would not give 
anything in to others, ‘with his extraordinary 
mix of  inspiration and preconceived ideas, 
generosity and envy’, as Jacques Ledoux, from 
the Belgian Cinémathèque, would say after his 
death, adding: ‘he was at the origin of  many 
Cinémathèques (even the one I run), and this 
I shall never forget’ (ROUD 1983: 205)1. The 
Portuguese Cinémathèque is amongst the many 
small and poor institutions with which Langlois 
was extremely generous, and upon which he still 
casts a shadow today. Founded in 1958, thanks to 
the passion and efforts of  Manuel Félix Ribeiro 
(1906–82), who was its director until his death, 
this Cinémathèque only started to work in decent 
conditions in the 1980s, when it ceased being 
poor and started to cease being small. Between 
1958 and 1980, the Portuguese Cinémathèque 
didn’t enjoy the conditions to show regular 
programmes, and could only afford to show two 
or three seasons per year. Henri Langlois, for pure 
cinephilic friendship with Félix Ribeiro, created 
three filmic and cultural events in Lisboa in the 
first half  of  the 1960s. Three big silent cinema 
seasons, one dedicated to French cinema (1962), 
another one to German cinema (1963) and the 
third to American cinema (1965). These seasons, 
programmed by Langlois with his own films 
copies, brought together films that he regularly 
showed in Paris, but which had never been 
shown in Lisboa in that way, brought together 
under a historical and cinephilic perspective. 
1. Roud also cites the testimony of  Françoise Jaubert 
(daughter of  Maurice Jaubert), to whom Ledoux said: 
‘Langlois was also my father, as well as he was yours.’
 —What is your dearest dream?
 —To die during a screening.
Dialogue from Brigitte et Brigitte (1966),
by Luc Moullet
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82 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012
Amongst the people involved in the 
Portuguese Cinémathèque, Langlois’s had a 
particularly strong relationship with João Bénard 
da Costa (1935–09), who granted the institution 
with a prestige and international projection 
unknown before his time. Cinephile and strongly 
influenced by French culture, Bénard didn’t have 
the opportunity to see the great classics during 
his formative years, because they were absolutely 
inaccessible in Lisboa during the 1950s and 
60s, due to political censorship, poverty and the 
country’s isolation more generally. For instance, 
in 1958, when he was 23 and made his first trip 
to Paris, Bénard ran to ‘Langlois’s Cinémathèque 
to kill the thirst of  years’: he could finally see The 
Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, Sergei 
M. Eisenstein, 1925). In other visits to Paris, 
alongside new films that he knew he would never 
be able to see in Portugal, he saw many classics at 
the Cinémathèque Française, which thus ceased 
being imagined films and became real films. 
He observed: ‘how to explain (…) the emotion 
that filled you once you entered the room (…) 
knowing that you would finally see The Battleship 
Potemkin, Birth of  a Nation (David W. Griffith, 
1915), Sunrise: A Song of  Two Humans (Friedrich 
W. Murnau, 1927) or The Passion of  Joan of  Arc 
(La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 
1928), on which we had so much read, seen 
dozens of  photographs, and now they were there 
before our eyes, on a cinema screen? That can 
only be lived, not told’ (DA COSTA 1986: 30). 
Eleven years after that first visit as a spectator to 
the Cinémathèque Française, João Bénard joined 
the film department at the Foundation Calouste 
Gulbenkian, which he started to programme in 
1971. But his true debut as a film programmer 
took place in November 1973, with a Roberto 
Rossellini retrospective, organised with the help 
of  Henri Langlois, who may well have been the 
real programmer of  the season. Langlois came to 
Lisboa for the opening screening, together with 
Rossellini, who was his personal friend, and a 
usual suspect in Paris but it was an extraordinary 
luxury to see him in Lisboa. Even if  the fact that 
the programme took place at the well-funded 
Gulbenkian Foundation had probably sharpen 
Langlois’s interest, whose  Cinémathèque lived 
under a permanent state of  crisis over the last 
years, it can still be seen as an example of  the 
generosity of  which he was capable. However, 
something  transformed the opening of  this 
Rossellini season into an exceptional event. Four 
moths before the Carnation Revolution that 
overthrew Salazar’s regime, the opening screening 
became a small political demonstration: at the 
end of  Roma, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945), 
the audience stood up, enthusiastic, and amongst 
the applauses to Rossellini, one could hear people 
shouting ‘hall freedom!’ and ‘down with fascism’. 
The ministers attending the screening left the 
room immediately. This was the first professional 
contact between Henri Langlois and João Bénard 
da Costa.
From then onwards, João Bénard developed a 
personal and professional friendship with Langlois 
and his wife, Mary Meerson, and he identified 
himself  with the founder of  the Cinémathèque 
Française to the point that until the end of  his 
days he would always have a framed photograph 
of  himself  and Langlois in his office. It is true 
that both men shared similar traits (a liking of  
secrets, a certain dose of  paranoia, perhaps more 
theatrical in Langlois and more spontaneous in 
Bénard), but they also had important differences. 
Langlois was chaotic and behaved himself  as an 
excentric outcast, whereas Bénard didn’t turn 
up his nose at formalisms and protocol. Even 
if  he could be authoritarian at times, Langlois 
had a democratic temperament and even says in 
the Anticours2: ‘None of  my collaborators has 
to call me ‘Monsieur le Directeur’. They can 
call me “shit”’. In this respect, João Bénard was 
completely different. From a certain moment, his 
form of  programming acquired precise Langlois-
like contours. But this only happened from 1980 
onwards, when he started programming at the 
2. Les Anti-cours d’Henri Langlois (1976–77), by Harry 
Fischbach, four hours and fifteen minutes of  interviews 
with Langlois, produced by the television of  Ontario 
(Canada).
ANTONIO RODRIGUES
83Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012
Portuguese Cinémathèque. Throughout the first 
nine years at the Gulbenkian Foundation, João 
Bénard didn’t programme on a regular basis, 
which obliged him to be very imaginative. At 
the Foundation, he programmed solid, integral 
monographic seasons: Mizoguchi, Rivette, 
Bresson, Truffaut. Langlois also programmed 
monographic seasons, but alternated them 
with other programmes. Most importantly, he 
didn’t feel the need to organise the screenings 
in seasons. He would make the most unlikely 
pairings, since what was most important for him 
was to see films, as many as possible. His method 
consisted in lacking one and in rejecting criteria 
of  ‘good tatse’ or ‘low’ or ‘high’ culture. In the 
1970s, Bénard organised three great seasons 
of  American cinema (1930s, 40s and 50s), but 
programmed them in a didactic and chronological 
manner, showing only the great titles. Such a 
programme is no way Langlois-like but was very 
much needed in the Lisboa of  the 1970s in order 
to produce an audience, whereas in Paris Langlois 
had the most cinephile audience worldwide, due 
to the exceptional offer in the cinemas across 
the city. In the 1970s, Bénard offered audiences 
in Lisboa films that had never been seen there 
before, or which had not been screened over 
the last twenty or thirty years, in order to offer a 
basic film education and be able to leap on a less 
conventional territory later on. Another crucial 
difference was that Bénard was an orthodox 
Auteurist, taking to its last consequences the 
Auteur Theory of  the Cahiers du cinéma of  the 
1950s: for him, there were the elected few film-
makers, who formed part of  a family, who could 
not commit any errors or make films that weren’t 
great; and the damned ones, without hope. 
Langlois, on the other hand, was more of  a filmist 
than an Auteurist. Furthermore, he played a key 
role in the formation of  the first generation of  
critics at Cahiers, who had so crucially influenced 
Bénard himself: their position in relationship to 
critics and criticism was completely opposed.
However there is an important aspect in the 
conception of  Langlois’s programme that found 
a lasting echo in the activity of  Joao Bénard: 
the ludic aspect, the pleasure of  composing 
the menu of  films included in the programme. 
Langlois enjoyed programming for an imaginary 
spectator that would attend all the screenings in 
a day (and in 1950s and 60s Paris, this spectator 
did indeed exist). He thus imagined secret 
bridges between the most disparate films. The 
poetic intuition that led Langlois to programme 
for an imaginary spectator is already manifest in 
the first programme he organised, even before 
founding the Cinémathèque Française. In 1934 
he rented a small room in the Champs Elysées 
that he called ‘Le Cinéma Fantastique’, and 
where he screened three feature films in a row 
and without any breaks: The Fall of  the House of  
Usher (La chute de la maison Usher, Jean Epstein, 
1928), The Cabinet of  Dr.Caligari (Das Cabinet des 
Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) and The Last 
Warning (Paul Leni, 1929). Still in the 1930s, 
he screened double bills such as Shoulder Arms 
(Charles Chaplin, 1918) and An Italian Straw Hat 
(Un chapeau de paille d’Italie, René Clair, 1928). 
Eric Rhode observed that the influence that 
Langlois exerted on the members of  the future 
Nouvelle Vague during their formative years, 
in the second half  of  the 1940s, was not only 
due to the amount of  films that he showed, but 
also to how he showed them. ‘Langlois showed 
three films per day, creating unexpected but 
reavealing juxtapositions, such as screening an 
Eisenstein before a Walsh or a Hitchcock after 
a Mizoguchi. His regular spectators were the 
first ones to have their sensibility immersed in 
the history of  cinema since its very beginning.’ 
(A History of  Cinema, 1969, quoted in ROUD, 
1983). In 1963 Langlois brought to the  New 
York Film Festival the then very rare L’Âge d’or 
(Luis Buñuel, 1930), but preceded its screening 
with something very different: a selection of  
films by the Lumière brothers. The audience 
didn’t like the mix very much and was impatient 
during the screening. Langlois then said to 
Richard Roud, the director of  the festival: 
‘don’t ever forget that one programmes for a 
10 per cent of  the public. Nothing matters, as 
long as that per cent is happy’. (ROUD, 1983: 
130)
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84 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012
João Bénard also appreciated this sort of  
programme, he also enjoyed proposing clues that 
only he knew and which could sometimes become 
private jokes. It wasn’t a form of  imitation but 
of  filiation, one of  the marks of  the relationship 
between those two men, born twenty years 
apart and who nevertheless had a very intense 
relationship between six brief  years. When Bénard 
took a certain distance from the monographic 
season, which were his main passion, he 
established imaginary bridges between the films, 
just as Langlois would also do. In the 1983 season 
‘Fritz Lang in America’, he didn’t present the films 
in a chronological order, but rather in chapters, an 
ordering that required that spectators followed the 
whole programme in order to perceive its meaning: 
nine films on guilt, five on absolute evil, four on 
adventure, to finish with ‘four works sui generis that 
will articulate these circumstances: Secret Beyond the 
Door (1947), Clash by Night (1952), The Blue Gardenia 
(1953), Human Desire (1954). This we begin with 
guilt and finish with desire.’ In 1992 he organised 
a programme titled ‘Variations on Oz’, since he 
considered The Wizard of  Oz (Victor Fleming et al, 
1939) ‘a superb metaphor of  cinema, its Ovidian 
metamorphosis, one of  the most subtle “films on 
films” of  the history of  cinema’ (DA COSTA, 
2008). This 1992 season was programmed for the 
imaginary spectator who would leave a screening 
only to enter into another diptych or triptych:  The 
Wizard of  Oz and From the Life of  the Marionettes (Aus 
dem Leben der Marionetten, Ingmar Bergman, 1980); 
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967) and The Night of  
the Iguana (John Huston, 1964); Moonfleet (Fritz 
Lang, 1955), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and 
Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967). In this context, a 
film  gained meaning – or another meaning – when 
placed next to another one.
If  all spectators and film programmers are 
Henri Langlois’s children, many are unaware of  
this because, as François Truffaut said, ‘Langlois 
only believed in education by osmosis’ (and he 
added: ‘And so do I.’) João Bénard da Costa was 
completely aware that he was a cinephile and a 
son of  Langlois via cinephilia, a ciné-fils (to use 
Serge Daney’s expression). He had a very strong 
character and this is precisely why instead of  hiding 
the influence Langlois had on him, He knew that 
this situated him amongst those who programme 
films as their passion and want to communicate 
that passion because they are enthusiasts.
DA COSTA, JOãO BénArD (1986). “50 Anos da Cinemateca 
Francesa, 60 Anos de Henri Langlois”, en Cinemateca 
Francesa 50 Anos - 1936-1986. Lisbon, Cinemateca 
Portuguesa.
DA COSTA, JOãO BénArD (2008). Presentation of  the 
programme «Como o Cinema Era Belo», in the June 
2008 catalogue of  the Portuguese Cinémathèque.
rOUD, riChArD (1983). A Passion for Films – Henri 
Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française. London, Secker & 
Warburg.
Born in Rio de Janeiro and French citizen. Member of  the 
Programming Service at the Portuguese Cinémathèque. 
In this post, he organised several programmes, with 
accompanying catalogues. In 2005 he programmed in 
Lisbon ‘Optimus Open Air’, with eighteen films screened 
open air on to a 300 square meter screen. He organised 
three film programmes at the Centro Cultural Banco de 
Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2000, 2002 and 2003. Before 
that, in Paris, he was a programmer at Studio 43, a venue 
for art films and was a critic of  the journal Cinématographe. 
He contributed to the Dictionnaire du Cinéma Mondial 
(Éditions du Rocher), Dictionnaire – 900 Cinéastes Français 
(Éditions Bordas) and Journeys of  Desire (British Film 
Institute). In 2008 hesobre las representaciones de Rio de 
Janeiro in cinema, and in 2010 João Bénard da Costa – Um 
Programador de Cinema. Since 2011 he is a programming 
adviser of  Cinecoa, a cinema festival in Vila Nova da Foz 
Côa (Portugal).
antonio.rodrigues@cinemateca.pt
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANTONIO RODRIGUES
ANTONIO RODRIGUES
85Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012


Transmission at the Cinémathèques

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