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128 MINUTES| FRENCH | COOLIDGE It’s hard to imagine people getting off their asses for anything these days, but demonstrating by the thousands to save the job of a film curator? The place was Paris, the time 1968, and the curator Henri Langlois. Jacques Richards’s chatty documentary helps explain why Langlois — as programmer of the Cinémathèque Française, preserver of lost films, and cinephilic gadfly — was a force in film as powerful as any of the auteurs he encouraged. From the ’30s, when his "Circle of Cinema" revived an interest in silent films, to the occupation, when he and his friends saved masterpieces from Nazi destruction by amusing subterfuge, to the New Wave, which was largely spawned from his tiny screening room, Langlois’s tale spins out from the anecdotes of those he touched and from revelatory archival film and interviews. Like his subject, Richards’s film is a little messy, a bit bloated, but always inspired.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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