Projectors & cameras: the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation collection

Critique : In business biographies, the artistic and cultural industries distill in many of us a taste of the familiar that is fascinating and exciting. Far from being nostalgic, this Proust madeleine is one of them. Entering through the “Projectors & Cameras”, the story of the origins of the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation collection told by Anne Gourdet-Marès completes the panorama of the democratization of the seventh art through amateur uses and professional practices. It extends and completes the work of Stéphanie Salmon (Pathé conquers the world2014) et Elvira Shahmiri (Cinema everywhere and for everyone. A history of reduced formats in France (1912-1939)2024). The pioneering companies in this history of cinematography through devices, techniques and technologies retrospectively write a cultural adventure of around 130 years whose first moments take place in France. These pages of the history of Pathé through the technological innovations that the Pathé firm has written allow you to discover the inventive abundance of engineers at the origin of numerous industrial patents and international standards which shaped cinema over the first 90 years of its existence. A pioneer in the development of amateur practices, Pathé is also a pioneer in the popularization of “general public” cinema which turns this industrial and technological history into a cultural and social history. Written chronologically, the work is an essential entrepreneurial contribution to the understanding of this artistic flagship of French capitalism. In this regard, it acts as a multiple-entry catalog and can be addressed “ to the researcher, the archivist, the collector but also the curious who questions the evolution of cinematographic techniques, their place in society and our relationship to them “. This invitation addressed to film historians to encourage them to take up technical questions testifies to the importance of this continent of historical studies in which a few isolated researchers or specialized publishers have already cut their teeth. From the correspondence of the Lumière brothers between 1890 and 1953 published by Cahiers du cinéma in 1994 to this catalog thirty years later, it is a global vision of this “industrial craftsmanship” to which the reader thus has access. The heritage of this technical history of cinema has developed since the centenary of cinema. It remains largely to be written, particularly within the framework of a history of brands and through the approach of company biographies.

Catalog of a collection of some 57 types of devices covering 90 years of inventions, the work has the merit of giving access to the representations and public and domestic uses which were made of these cameras, projectors, tape recorders, motocameras, of these film reels… privileged access routes to mass culture but also a means of education. Indeed, among these uses, the educational uses of these tools constitute a common thread in this history which, particularly from the launch of the Pathé Ideal projector in 1910, is part of this ambition of teaching through cinema, “to the search for the perfect projector”. This first exploratory attempt was only ephemeral, but Anne Gourdet-Marès sees it as “ milestones of what would become small production and educational cinema in 35 mm “. It is therefore also a work of memory and transmission that we enjoy reading, capable of opening horizons of curiosity and discovery.

Publication date: October 2024

Name of pages: 392

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