At its beginning, film archives were dominated by personalities who loved film but who steadfastly protected their treasures from anyone unwilling to nourish their egos. These early archivists were cult figures, wallowing in the adulation of their young admirers. They loved film, but often the film decomposed or was destroyed in fires because they were unwilling even to share the labor of preservation with others. James Card in the United States and Henri Langlois in France were collectors institutionalized along with their collections. Henry [sic] Langlois (1914-1977) of the Cinémathèque Française personified the independent-minded, highly autocratic film archivist, in love with films and the power which their ownership bestowed. Obese (he loved food as much as films) and charming, he manipulated the young breed of French filmmakers of the 1950s to such an extent that when the French minister of culture, André Malraux, tried to take the Cinémathèque away from him in 1968, there was no filmmaker in France—from François Truffaut to Jean-Luc Godard—unwilling to support Langlois. As a result, he was reinstated. Films at the Cinémathèque continued to decompose, while Langlois mischievously adopted the attitude that the only legitimate way to save nitrate film was to transfer it to new nitrate film stock—no matter that such stock was no longer manufactured. Langlois loved mystery, to such an extent that he hid a considerable number of films in the Cinémathèque collection, and they remain "lost" to this day. The New York Times (December 4, 1977) reported that after Langlois' death as many as 25,000 titles were "missing." Langlois was worshipped by filmmakers the world over. The writer recalls being present at a 1977 luncheon in Beverly Hills at which King Vidor offered a toast to Langlois for saving his and all the other films of his generation of American filmmakers. It was so pitifully untrue that it was laughable, and yet Vidor's fellow directors joined him in the benediction—it did not occur to one of them that their films might, in reality, have survived thanks to the efforts of American film archivists. Similarly, François Truffaut was an ardent Langlois supporter, but when he needed to view films for his book on Alfred Hitchcock, he went not to the Cinémathèque Française, but to Jacques Ledoux's Cinémathèque Royale in Brussels.
Nitrate Won't Wait, p. 6-7.