The Paris Atlas

Archives

Film stock decays, and for the first fifty years of cinema almost nobody was keeping it. These are the collections that did, and much of what survives from the period survives because of them.

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Cinémathèque française at 51 rue de Bercy, Frank Gehry's building, seen across the paving with its glass entrance rotunda below stacked stone volumes

Film archive · 1936–present · ParisCinémathèque françaiseHenri Langlois's film archive, grown from the film society he started with Georges Franju in the mid-1930s — the screening rooms where the Cahiers du cinéma generation learned film history, and the institution whose defense put filmmakers into the streets in 1968.Read the history

How these pages work

An archive page carries what the collection holds, who built it, and the visitor facts as the institution states them, with the date we last checked. Practical details rot faster than history, so they ship with that date attached rather than without one.