In the late summer of 1950, a screen stood in the middle of Antibes harbour. On it, Jacques Cousteau projected Épaves, the first film shot with his Aqua-Lung, to an audience gathered on the quayside. Up the hill in the Grimaldi museum, Jean-Paul Sartre was laughing hysterically at Harry Langdon, Musidora sat beside the screen narrating Feuillade’s Vendémiaire, and somewhere in town Raymond Queneau was shooting the only film he would ever direct.

This was Henri Langlois’s Festival du Film de Demain: a month of films from forty-five countries, Picasso drawing on his actors’ faces, Fernand Léger’s last film and Jean Genet’s only one. Hardly anyone remembers it.

Langlois’s Festival

Henri Langlois had been central to the circle that produced Biarritz’s Festival du Film Maudit. Mary Meerson, his partner, would later claim that the festival had been his idea. Biarritz was conceived as an alternative to Cannes, which had itself been set up as a counter-festival to Venice.

By 1950, Langlois had gone his own way. Rather than wait for Objectif 49’s second Biarritz, he announced a festival of his own in Combat in July. The Festival du Film de Demain ran from 20 August to 20 September 1950, overlapping the second Biarritz (11–18 September) almost entirely. By the time the Rendez-vous de Biarritz limped through its week without Cocteau or Bazin, Langlois had already been screening for three weeks.

The festival promised censored films in their original versions, international films of all sorts, and work by non-filmmakers to shake things up. It was deliberately dated to compete with Venice, opening on the same day. Supposedly, the whole festival cost no more than 60,000 francs, which Parallèle 50 wryly called “the price of a single gala evening in Venice” (29 September 1950).

The screenings took place mainly at the Grimaldi museum in Antibes, with some films shown in the open market and others directly on the waterfront. The least publicly acceptable films were screened at the Villa Noailles, home of the art patron and salonnière Marie-Laure de Noailles.

Langlois solicited films from across the globe; so many, in fact, that the organisers planned day-and-night screenings in the museum without interruption. Films came from forty-five countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Egypt, Turkey, China, India, the USSR, Italy and Germany; even Walt Disney sent reels.

There were no prizes, and the festival was held with the explicit intent of not separating art from the general public. Local families watched alongside Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, Jean-Paul Sartre (noted laughing hysterically at the Mack Sennett and Harry Langdon comedies), Joseph Paul-Boncour, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.

Georges Sadoul was particularly pleased by the absence of any rigid barrier between the films and the audience, and he made the comparison explicit. For Sadoul, Antibes was everything Biarritz was not: open, international and popular, where the Films Maudits, with their preference for film noir and American studio cinema, had been reactionary (Les Lettres françaises, 21 September 1950).

Alongside the festival, an exhibition on cinema, theatre sets, and costumes ran from 1 August to 20 September, drawing on the collections of the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, the Comédie-Française, the National Library of Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art. On display were works by Serge Lifar, Pablo Picasso, Léon Barsacq, Jean Hugo, André Andrejew, Edward Gordon Craig, Claude Autant-Lara, Hein Heckroth, Alexandre Trauner, Lazare Meerson, Christian Bérard, Giorgio de Chirico, Alexandre Benois and Max Douy.

Films Screened

The Festival du Film de Demain had an expansive line-up, 180 films by one estimate, but no definitive programme or complete record survives. What follows is my reconstruction from contemporary sources.

French and Belgian Films

• Vendémiaire (1918), Louis Feuillade. A sprawling silent epic set against the backdrop of the First World War, screened with Musidora, Feuillade’s muse, sitting beside the screen giving live commentary.
• Travail (1920), Henri Pouctal. A massive multi-part silent adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel, starring Léon Mathot and Huguette Duflos.
• La Roue (1923), Abel Gance. Gance’s revolutionary silent film. It’s unclear which cut ran.
• Napoléon (1927), Abel Gance. Langlois was famously obsessed with preserving it and stitching it back together, which explains its inclusion.
• L’Âge d’or (1930), Luis Buñuel. Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece, attacked by the Ligue des Patriotes on release and banned by the Paris police chief.
• L’Atalante (1934), Jean Vigo. A print completed by Langlois from outtakes given to him by Henri Beauvais. Vigo’s biographer Pierre Lherminier calls it the most complete version possible.
• Adieu Léonard (1943), Pierre Prévert, co-written with his brother Jacques. A quirky comedy heavily altered by wartime shortages and other problems, shown in a print restored and reconstructed by the Cinémathèque.
• Le Monde de Paul Delvaux (1946), Henri Storck (Belgium). A dreamlike documentary on the painter, with poetry read by Paul Éluard and a score by André Souris.
• Matisse (1946), François Campaux. A 26-minute documentary with now-legendary slow-motion footage of Matisse’s brushwork.
• Épaves (1943), Jacques Cousteau. Projected at the port of Antibes on a screen set up in the middle of the water. It was the first film made with the Aqua-Lung. Cousteau also screened three unreleased underwater films.
• Images médiévales (1948), William Novik. A short on the illuminated manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale, winner of the special prize for colour at Cannes in 1949.
• Initiation à la danse des possédés (1948), Jean Rouch. An ethnographic film of a Songhay possession ritual, and winner of the only prize at Biarritz in 1949.
• Bip et le rendez-vous (1948), Robert Valey. An 11-minute silent short with Marcel Marceau, now viewable only at the Forum des images.
• Les Charmes de l’existence (1949), Jean Grémillon and Pierre Kast. A documentary on late-nineteenth-century academic painting: Rochegrosse, Bouguereau and others.
• Visite à Picasso (1949), Paul Haesaerts (Belgium). Fresh from winning the documentary prize at Venice, it shows Picasso painting directly onto large sheets of glass set in front of the lens.
• De Renoir à Picasso (1949–50), Paul Haesaerts (Belgium). A 32-minute art essay sorting painters into three pillars: sensuality (Renoir), intellect (Seurat) and passion (Picasso). Georges Sadoul hated its rigid, pedantic approach.
• Guernica (1950), Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens. A milestone of the art documentary, built from Picasso’s work and Paul Éluard’s words.
• Histoire d’Agnès (1950), Roger Livet. A now impossible-to-find short by the surrealist photographer.
• A Jean Painlevé retrospective, including Aluminium et nitrate d’argent, Microscopie à bord d’un bateau de pêche, Culture du cœur, Caroline, Le Diptyque, Crapauds et crevettes, L’Hippocampe, Assassins d’eau douce, Essai de photogénie and Voyage dans le ciel.

Soviet Films

• Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein. Long one of the most censored films in cinema history. Langlois sourced a complete, uncut version for the festival.
• The End of St. Petersburg (1927), Vsevolod Pudovkin. Made for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution; a key work of Soviet montage.
• Storm over Asia (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin. The final film of Pudovkin’s revolutionary trilogy.
• Zvenigora (1928), Aleksandr Dovzhenko. The first Dovzhenko film to be widely covered; a silent revolutionary epic.
• ¡Que viva México! (1930–32), Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s legendarily abandoned film, seized, cut apart and sold off. This was a reconstruction, possibly Kenneth Anger’s, later attacked by Jean-Luc Godard in La Gazette du cinéma.
• Guilty Without Guilt (Bez viny vinovatye, 1945), Vladimir Petrov. An adaptation of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s 1884 melodrama.
• The Story of a Real Man (1948), Aleksandr Stolper. Based on Alexey Maresyev, the Soviet fighter ace who lost both legs and fought his way back to active combat.
• The Battle of Stalingrad (1949), Vladimir Petrov. A massive two-part docudrama mixing re-enactment and documentary footage; a huge box-office hit in the USSR.
• Academician Ivan Pavlov (1949), Grigori Roshal. A biographical drama on the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist.
• Michurin (1949), Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Dovzhenko’s first colour film and his last completed one, on the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich.

American Films

• The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin.
• Greed (1924), Erich von Stroheim. Which version was shown isn’t recorded.
• The Circus (1928), Charlie Chaplin.
• Long Pants (1927), Frank Capra. One of Capra’s first features, starring Harry Langdon. Famously critiqued by Buster Keaton for going too far in making light of murder.
• Queen Kelly (1929), Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim’s legendary, barely released film, shown about ten days after Sunset Boulevard premiered in the US. Wilder’s film uses footage from it, which makes this a real coup.
• The Life of Émile Zola (1937), William Dieterle. The Academy Award winner for Best Picture, banned by French censors under Blum and Daladier to avoid public unrest. Antibes was its French premiere.
• Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Edward F. Cline. W.C. Fields’s last starring feature, famously butchered by Universal and now considered a classic.
• Native Land (1942), Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand. Narrated by Paul Robeson, this pro-labour film mixed documentary footage and re-enactment to expose corporate suppression of unions.
• The Land (1942), Robert J. Flaherty. A Department of Agriculture documentary on rural displacement so bleak that the government shelved it; it never had a general release. Another coup for Langlois.
• The Uncomfortable Man (1948), Theodore Huff and Kent Munson. A silent avant-garde short; one of the earliest American psychodramas.
• The Quiet One (1948), Sidney Meyers. A documentary on the rehabilitation of a troubled Harlem boy, nominated for two Academy Awards.

Canadian Films

• Mouvement perpétuel (1949), Claude Jutra. The 18-year-old Jutra’s first film, winner of the Canadian Film Award for best amateur film in 1950.

Italian Films

• Cabiria (1914), Giovanni Pastrone. The crown jewel of early Italian cinema.
• Pianto delle zitelle (1939), Giacomo Pozzi Bellini. An anthropological documentary on a religious procession in rural Italy, censored under Mussolini and rarely screened until 2006.
• Barboni (1946), Dino Risi. A neorealist documentary on the homeless and unemployed of postwar Milan.
• N.U. (1948), Michelangelo Antonioni. A short on the working day of Rome’s street cleaners.
• Buio in sala (1950), Dino Risi. A brilliant short that turns the camera on the audience, catching their candid expressions as they watch a film.
• Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras’s art shorts: Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli and Goya.

Uruguayan Films

• Turay, enigma de las llanuras (1950), Enrico Gras and Antonio Jiménez. An art film by the Genoa-born Gras, who was working in South America at the time. Presented in 1951 at Cannes.

Swedish Films

• Two People (1945), Carl Theodor Dreyer. A psychological drama Dreyer made after fleeing occupied Denmark. He famously hated the final studio cut.

Other Films

Unnamed films by Joris Ivens, John Huston, D.W. Griffith, Leonid Trauberg and Humphrey Jennings were also shown, alongside various surgical films and Totò’s comedies. The line-up also included an unreleased film, La Grotte de Lascaux et ses images préhistoriques, by the explorer Bernard de Colmont, and a film titled Mobiles on Alexander Calder. The latter was listed without a director, but it may have been one of the documentaries by Herbert Matter or Jean Painlevé.

Amateur Films: Queneau, Sartre, Picasso

A central part of Langlois’s concept, and its main interest for us now, was handing out 16mm cameras and film stock to guests, encouraging them to shoot footage that would be screened before the festival ended. Some participants were approached and filmed in advance; others simply took a camera from Langlois on site and started shooting.

Plenty of people are claimed to have shot something. Before the festival opened, Combat reported that Jean-Paul Sartre was assembling a long reel documenting graffiti on café toilet walls, that Jean Genet was directing a film with no women in it, and that Jean-Pierre Melville was shooting The Death of President Félix Faure, playing Faure himself (19 July 1950).

The specifics are unclear. Jacques Rivette later recalled a short film by Sartre about graffiti, which suggests it was completed but probably screened privately at the Villa Noailles. Melville’s film isn’t mentioned by name in any surviving record, and no completed Faure film is known to exist. Genet’s film, as we’ll see, was finished.

Some people supposedly filmed something, but there’s no definite evidence that they did:

• Combat reported that George Bernard Shaw had agreed to take part. Given that he was 94 and would be dead within months, it’s unlikely that he did.
• Jacques Prévert was mentioned in one pre-festival source as making a film, and he certainly attended, but there’s no evidence he shot anything.
• A pre-festival article in France-Soir (29 July 1950) listed several names that appear in no later screening record, including Peter Brook, Elsa Triolet, John Grierson and Kenneth Anger.
• Freddy Baume said several participants failed to finish their films in time, including Boris Vian, Marcello Pagliero, Mario Prassinos and Francis Blanche (Photo-Cinéma, 1 October 1950).

Several well-known figures did film something, but we know little about what:

• Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-born writer who had been an assistant director on La Roue, reportedly filmed a contribution.
• Yvette Chauviré, France’s leading ballerina, apparently filmed a concept developed by George Balanchine.
• The Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck filmed something.
• The Mexican playwright Rodolfo Usigli and the painter Diego Rivera were both noted as having filmed material.
• Paul Haesaerts apparently shot a piece based on the work of Michel de Ghelderode.
• The physicist Louis Leprince-Ringuet filmed something.
• The Italian avant-garde painter and photographer Luigi Veronesi filmed a piece.
• Alexandre Astruc shot a short in Cahors that was well received by audiences; the print is now lost.

Which projects were actually finished and screened, and at least have a known title? As far as the sources suggest, these:

• Un chant d’amour, Jean Genet. The film Combat announced in July as having no women in it. It is now the most famous film to come out of Antibes, though the usual accounts of how it was made never mention the festival.
• L’Âge atomique, Fernand Léger. Never publicly released, this little-known but confirmed film was Léger’s last.
• La Famille Brown, Laurette Brunius, then 18, daughter of the surrealist Jacques Brunius.
• Études sur Pignon, Claude Souef. By a little-known avant-garde filmmaker, on the work of the painter Édouard Pignon.
• Napoléon et Tomi ou La Chute de Carthage, a Dr Dentrelle. I have no idea who or what this is.
• L’Esprit malin and Cercle, Freddy Baume, from a screenplay by the mime Étienne Decroux. Baume was a Cinémathèque collaborator whose film Saint-Germain-des-Prés had been seized by the police in September 1949, perhaps an inspiration for the festival’s interest in banned films.
• La Mort de Charlotte Corday, Pablo Picasso and Frédéric Rossif. A lost film made in Vallauris, for which Picasso reportedly used ceramics and sculptures and drew on his actors’ faces. It was screened and never seen again.
• La Magique Image, Musidora. A homage to Feuillade by his former muse, by then working at the Cinémathèque, which she wrote, directed, edited and starred in. Long lost, it was rediscovered in February 2026 and has since been screened at the Cinémathèque.
• Le Lendemain, Raymond Queneau. The only film Queneau ever directed, with Queneau himself in the main role. It was shot between 25 and 27 August 1950 and screened just once. Queneau forbade its distribution; whether it survives, and where, is unknown.

Several of the festival’s films were shown again at the Cinémathèque française in November 1950. Jean-Luc Godard reviewed those screenings with indignation in La Gazette du cinéma, though he was hardly neutral: he was furious that Le Quadrille, Jacques Rivette’s short, which Godard had funded, co-written and starred in, had been left out.

Conclusion

Although the festival was a success, it was never repeated. Langlois planned a second edition, but it never materialised. A successor “Film of Tomorrow” event took place from 15 to 24 October 1954 in Switzerland (in Zurich or Basel, depending on the account), organised by the Swiss Cinémathèque. It showed three hundred films and gave its grand prize to Georges Franju. The original Festival du Film de Demain, meanwhile, faded into the general background of the postwar cinephile boom.

Biarritz has had the larger afterlife, largely because it fed into the story of Cahiers du cinéma, although even that link is looser than legend suggests. Antibes had no magazine to carry its memory, only Langlois, who was brilliant at saving films and hopeless at keeping records of his own work.

That it happened at all is something of an achievement. Eighteen years later, in 1968, the Ministry of Culture under André Malraux would try to remove Langlois from the Cinémathèque, citing exactly the disorganisation that made a festival like Antibes possible.

Sources

Periodicals

• Combat, 19 July 1950
• France-Soir, 29 July 1950
• Libération, 24 August 1950
• Le Patriote de Nice et du Sud-Est, 26 August 1950
• Point de vue, 31 August 1950
• The Morocco Press, 1 September 1950
• Le Figaro, 5 September 1950
• Ce Soir, 19 September 1950
• Les Lettres françaises, 21 September 1950
• Parallèle 50, 29 September 1950
• Photo-Cinéma, 1 October 1950
• La Cinématographie française, 1950 (undated)
• Jean-Luc Godard, La Gazette du cinéma No 5, 1950
• Alger républicain, 2 November 1951
• L’Écho du soir, 22 September 1954
• Le Courrier du Maroc, 16 November 1954

Books

• Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. and trans. Tom Milne, introduction by Richard Roud, 1972
• Pierre Lherminier, Jean Vigo, 1984
• Richard Roud, A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, 1983