An eccentric who was often at the centre of controversy for his methods,[4] he also served as a key influence on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would become the French New Wave.

In 1974, Langlois received an Academy Honorary Award for "his devotion to the art of film, his massive contributions in preserving its past and his unswerving faith in its future".

Besides films, Langlois also helped to preserve other items related to cinema such as cameras, projection equipment, costumes, and vintage theatre programmes.

He eventually collected so many items that he donated them in 1972 to the Musée du Cinéma in the Palais de Chaillot, where they covered a two-mile span of film artifacts and memorabilia.

[citation needed] During the Second World War, Langlois and his colleagues helped to save many films that were at risk of being destroyed during the Nazi occupation of France.

Langlois influenced the French New Wave directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,[3] Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais among others, and the generation of filmmakers that followed.

The exhibition, co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum and the City Center of Music and Drama in New York, showed seventy films dating from the medium's first seventy-five years on thirty-five consecutive evenings from July 29 to September 3, 1970.

In 1970, an English language documentary Henri Langlois was made about his life's work, featuring interviews with Ingrid Bergman, Lillian Gish, François Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and others.

[13] It features interviews with friends, colleagues, academics, and such movie luminaries as Simone Signoret, Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut and Jean-Michel Arnold.