"Listen, darling" Mary Meerson would declare, "I am the Memory of the Film. I am the world film knowledge, the world's film history". I was never in any doubt about this.

Back when I was earnestly setting about establishing a film archive for New Zealand in the late 1970's, I wrote to the Cinémathèque Française to ask them if I could visit. Langlois was dead, and I didn't have the name of anyone to write to. Remarkably, as archives are not generally noted for their letter writing abilities, I received a reply back from some functionary at the Cinémathèque, inviting me to call when I got to Paris.

I telephoned, and explained as best I could in my limited French who I wanted to meet, why I wanted to visit and what I was trying to do. The woman who answered at the Cinemathèque, rather disconcertingly, made it quite clear there was no point whatsoever in my seeing the person who'd written to me (who was clearly not to be trusted, I was learning fast). It was equally clear that the only person who could help me in my quest was Madame Langlois. "And", she said, "I am Madame Langlois".

We met late at night in the heart of Chaillot. Mary was strategically and dramatically occupying a desk in the enormous hall at the end of the Musée du Cinéma, phone pressed to her ear, fingers circling the dial relentlessly. I was sent into the Musée (closed at the time) to wander alone among the treasures for an hour or so. It was the first of many meetings.

This great, marvellous, grand and mysterious woman was (and remains) an inspiration to me, and I loved her dearly. She took me in when I was struggling to shape my ideas for setting up the film archive in New Zealand. What eventually grew into The New Zealand Film Archive would have been poorer, and certainly less creative, without Mary's generosity and passion. She helped open up fresh and exciting possibilities. For films to live, she would insist, they needed people to see them. "Save it to show, or it becomes a dentist's window".

"Mary Meerson does not exist. I am Scheherazade", she told Richard Roud in his book on Langlois. A star of Montparnasse of the late 1920s, she was a model for de Chirico and Reisling; Kokoschka did a series of portraits; and Lotte Eisner described her as being elegant and as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich. This was the Mary Meerson I only heard whispers about from others.

She never spoke to me of her own history, only stories of other people. Of Eisenstein and Alexandrov in Paris making Romance Sentimentale, financed by a jewel dealer on the condition his wife appeared in the film. With Lazare Meerson doing the sets, and adding for Eisenstein "a little spot of Russian Revolution" in the form of lightning flashes and stars suddenly coming through the window into the salon while the lady is "singing, singing".

Where she came from (Bulgaria maybe?), when she was born (1900?), Mary would never say. She spoke five languages (at least), and lived with Lazare Meerson - the great Polish-born French set designer, in an apartment he designed on rue Gazan facing Parc Montsouris. Mary accompanied Meerson to London, where he died suddenly in 1938 while working for Korda.

Mary was with Jean Renoir and Robert Flaherty (Flaherty she described to me always as "King of the Image" and "like a father to me") when she first met Langlois in Paris in 1941. He at first thought she was Flaherty's daughter Monica. When he discovered who she really was - that was just as good, as Langlois was then trying to arrange an exhibition of Meerson's work - she became, according to Richard Roud, "the most important person in Langlois's adult life... and their relationship is inseparable from the history of the Cinémathèque Française".

By the time Mary befriended me, she was huge (nothing about Mary was less than dramatic), draped in great tent-like robes, and extremely shortsighted. "Nothing is a long distance" she said, and it is true, I never saw her for long without a telephone pressed close to her ear. It never stopped - sometimes she answered it, mostly she poked at it, listened, growled into it, or just put it down again. Constantly, dialing and re-dialing from memory, only sometimes peering in her notebook for numbers. She had a fantastic information network, she knew everybody. The world was divided, not particularly evenly, into friends and enemies, and the friends were legendary names in cinema.

I was endlessly excited, amazed, amused, frustrated and delighted in her company. She would always be arranging for me to meet particular people, or involving me in "top secret" invitations to be part of enormous international tributes to film the like of which had never been done before (and have yet to be realised). Her carefully arranged "picnics" were especially extraodinary and wonderful. One, after frequent calls to check the food was exactly what was required and going to be ready exactly when required, took place at midnight across Paris, where I ate inside and she remained in the van with the food (jam, as I recall) ferried out to her there. Another, this time at the apartment, consisted of smoked salmon, fresh from Iran, and a Russian Easter cheesecake (Mary knew every detail of its recipe) eaten in our fingers - with vintage champagne. And completed with Mary upstairs, talking to me on the telephone extension downstairs, although her every word could be heard without the aid of the phone. Mary could always be heard...

But mostly I kept in touch by endless postcards to her (she was very particular about how things had to be done, and each card had to be in an envelope, not simply stamped and sent), or through the friends who were close to her when she no longer saw people. And by calls of course when I was close or could afford them. She could be called any time, day or night. After one long call she inquired the time. "Its 9 o'clock, Mary" I said. "But darling, is it 9 o'clock in the morning or 9 o'clock at night?" One of the last times we spoke was a mad late night call, from Edith Kramer's kitchen in Berkeley after I had left the New Zealand Film Archive. She was getting very deaf, but wanted to know that I was safe, as we shouted at each other (and to half Berkeley!).

She was certainly mythical. She was the history of film, and of film archives, to me. Whenever I show films, take them out and put them before an audience, she is around. "Darling... I am with you always, I am the Memory of the Film!" Mary is the true spirit of the cinema.

Jonathan Dennis