WORKING HARD ON A NEW TOPIC LINKED TO EARLIER RESEARCH ON PATHE NEWS (AND THAT FUNNY OLD COCKEREL)

VE Day's 80th Anniversary Plans Unveiled

In The News

The upcoming 80th anniversary of VE Day will be marked with 4 days of nationwide events and commemorations, it has been announced. Our VE Day collection has some of the best and most iconic footage of 8 May 1945 and its context.

VE Day Collection

Just lately, one of my research projects required a little help from Pathé News, the producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom.

Their founder Charles Pathe was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as B Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online. 

Often, researchers and archivists have chosen Pathe News to widen their studies and many of us choose this area to learn more about this team of film-makers. Their roots lie in 1896 in Paris when Societe Pathe Freres was founded by Charles Pathe and his brothers Emile, Theophile and Jacques all living a the time in France. Charles Pathé adopted the national emblem of France, the cockerel, as the trademark for his company. After the company, now called Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frère Phonographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with Pathé-Journal. French Pathé began its newsreel in 1908 and opened a newsreel office in London's Wardour Street in 1910.

The newsreels were shown in the cinema and were silent until 1928. At first, they ran for about four minutes and were issued fortnightly. During the early days, the camera shots were taken from a stationary position but the Pathé newsreels captured events such as Franz Reichelt's fatal parachute jump from the Eiffel Tower and suffragette Emily Davison's fatal injury by a racehorse at the 1913 Epsom Derby. 

Duration: 3 minutes and 29 seconds.

During the the Great War, the cinema newsreels were called the Pathé Animated Gazettes, and for the first time this provided newspapers with competition. After 1918, British Pathé started producing a series of cinemazines, in which the newsreels were much longer and more comprehensive. By 1930, British Pathé was covering news, entertainment, sport, culture, and women's issues through programmes including the Pathétone Weekly, the Pathé Pictorial, the Gazette and Eve’s Film Review.

In 1927, the company sold British Pathé (both the feature film and the newsreel divisions) to First National. (French Pathé News continued until 1980, and the library is now part of the Gaumont-Pathe collection.) Pathé changed hands again in 1933, when it was acquired by British International Pictures, which was later known as Associated British Picture Corporation.  In 1958, it was sold again to Warner Brothers and became Warner-Pathé. Pathé eventually stopped producing the cinema newsreel in February 1970. However, I am so fond of their team and am always keen to refer to them from time to time in my column work.