Gaumont and Pathé together
After having been united by their founding of the EuroPalaces network of cinemas, the two French cinema giants, Gaumont and Pathé have now decided to also unite their archives of cinema and audiovisual documentation and materials. The new structure has been christened Gaumont-Pathé Archives and will be directed by Martine Offroy, current President of the Toulouse Cinemateque and Vice President of the French Cinemateque.
The collection will include 12,000 hours of cinematographic documents from silent films to today’s, almost 2000 titles, cinema news magazines like Pathé, Gaumont, and Éclair from 1908 until 1979, the Sygma archives, an ample panorama of the world of documentaries, the Télédis catalogue, which was repurchased in 2002 by Gaumont (with films by Renoir, Clouzot, Ophuls, Becker, Melville) and the recently acquired Soviet archives of Arkeion. Controlled by Gaumont, which holds 57.6 percent (42.5 percent is in the hands of Pathé), the structure, which should be operative from early 2004, aims to share in works of restoration and to promote artistic images of considerable and undisputed value in France and abroad.
(Translated from French)
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