A cinematheque is an archive of films and film-related objects with an exhibition venue.[1][2] Similarly to a book library (bibliothèque in French), a cinematheque is responsible for preserving and making available to the public film heritage. Typically, a cinematheque has at least one motion picture theatre, which offers screenings of its collections and other international films.
From the first cinema screenings until 1930, several attempts to establish film archives were initiated in Europe, the US and Russia. As early as 1898, the photographer and cameraman Bolesław Matuszewski evoked the idea of a film archive. "It is a matter of giving this perhaps privileged source of history the same authority, the same official existence, the same access as to other archives already known".[3] The "Archives of the Planet” (Les Archives de la planète) were established by French banker Albert Kahn, between 1912 and 1931.[4] Military film archives were also created in France, Germany and Great Britain after the First World War. The cinematheque of the city of Paris, for educational purposes, was created in 1925.[5]
Cinémathèque Jean Marie Boursicot [fr] in Marseille, dedicated exclusively to the conservation of advertising film, enriched every year, by an additional 25 000 films sent by 750 advertising agency correspondents in 80 countries.
Cinémathèque Robert-Lynen [fr] founded in 1926 in Paris. One of the things that sets it apart from other cinematheques is that it is used for educational purposes by schools (from nursery to high school).
Cinémathèque du documentaire [fr] in Paris, responsible for supporting and promoting the production and distribution of works in the documentary genre.
National Audiovisual Institute is the repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. It has allowed free online consultation on a website called ina.fr with a search tool indexing 100,000 archives of historical programs, for a total of 20,000 hours.
^"cinematheque". Collins English French Electronic Dictionary. HarperCollins Publishers. 2005. Archived from the original on 2009-07-18. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
^"cinémathèque". Wiktionnaire. Archived from the original on 2010-10-31. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
^Matuszewski, Boleslaw (1898). Une nouvelle source de l'histoire (eng. A New Source of History). Paris. p. 6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
