It was in 1895, on the Paris Grands Boulevards, that the Lumière brothers turned a technical invention into the driving force behind a projection and a collective emotion, in front of the first 33 spectators in the history of cinema.
Over the past 130 years, this legacy has continued to evolve, and today, France is more than ever the homeland of the seventh art: that of cinematography. The country boasts an unrivaled track record, the world’s most passionate film population, 6,200 cinemas and 800 festivals – including Cannes, the epicenter of global film creation. France’s globally admired financing model – via the [French public managing body for cinematic and audiovisual arts] CNC and broadcasters’ investment obligations – along with public policies, foster an unparalleled diversity of films, from the most popular to the most artistically demanding.
There is only one flaw in this picture: On several occasions, France has missed the opportunity to create the great film museum that the public has been waiting for, as demonstrated by the success of the Cinémathèque Française’s exhibitions in spite of being held in a poorly suited venue.
We have some of the finest collections in the world, because since its creation in 1936, the Cinémathèque Française has collected and preserved not only films from all over the world but also the objects and documents associated with their production. These include posters, photographs, costumes, sets, projection equipment, cameras, scripts, storyboards and even pre-cinema artifacts like magic lanterns.
The public must finally be given the opportunity to discover our internationally significant collection as a cohesive whole, including the sets for Marcel Carné’s Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), the mummified head from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Federico Fellini’s drawings, the robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first Lumière cinematograph, Kenji Mizoguchi’s sketches or the camera used to shoot Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind.
Righting a historical wrong
Such a project existed for a time, but since the Cinémathèque Française museum was forced to close in 1997 following a fire, these remarkable collections have been stored away in crates. As a result, France, the birthplace of cinema, can no longer offer the global public the grand narrative of the global film history of cinema or showcase the richness of its future.
At a time when the Americans have recently opened the highly successful Oscar Museum [in Los Angeles], it is time for France to present both the country and the world with the great cinema museum that we dreamed of with [former culture minister] Jack Lang 40 years ago.
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