BFI Archive 75

We joined in with the BFI National Archive's celebrations offering a small selection of key titles from our book and journal collections related to the Archive's history.

The jewels of the display, almost hidden at the far end of the Reading Room in a cabinet containing items from our Special Collections, were items documenting the stormy relationship between Ernest Lindgren and Henri Langlois, pioneers of the film archive movement.

'Je t'aime moi non plus'

In the early 1930s, a number of individuals and organisations in various countries realised – simultaneously but largely in a non-concerted way – that the permanent preservation of film had become an urgent necessity. This led to the establishment of the first major film archives, respectively in Stockholm, Berlin, London, New York and Paris.

Among the leaders of this movement, two personalities in particular stood out: Ernest Lindgren, first curator of Britain's National Film Library (the initial name of the BFI National Archive), and Henri Langlois, general secretary of the Cinémathèque française.

For the next 40 years these two key figures played a crucial role – each with his own priorities – in legitimising the work of film archives, building up from scratch invaluable collections of film classics and more generally defining techniques and strategies of acquisition, selection, preservation and exhibition still largely embraced by film archives around the world today.

An early example of the regular misunderstandings which marred the Lindgren/Langlois relationship. Here Lindgren reacts angrily to a previous letter sent to him by Langlois. Click on the image for a full-size version.

This small display, based in particular on the unique correspondence between Langlois and Lindgren preserved in the BFI's Special Collections and organised chronologically, examined the nature of the collaborative work which the two men developed via the bilateral exchanges between their archives as well as their leadership of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). It also briefly introduced the well-known difficult personal relationship between two figures whose different cultural and institutional backgrounds, as well as conflicting temperaments and views on film archiving, ended in their definitive fall-out at the turn of the 1960s.

Display by Christophe Dupin, Anne-Cécile Dockes and Rachael Keene