Gaumont's treasures underline the company's restoration program

In order to celebrate his 130th anniversary, Gaumont's Treasures started a retrospective century retrospective with 600 DCP film restorations, which were made available throughout exhibitors, film clubs and festival programmers all year round. In view of the status of Gaumont as the oldest film house in the world, this year's retrospective is only scratching the surface of a library, which very well follows the full history of the cinema.

From 1896 to 1929 the company produced almost 7,000 narrative shorts, and despite the deterioration, the studio was still able to preserve about half of these titles – which was one of the most extensive plates in silent film.

In addition to this work, the Gaumont collection also includes about 15,000 hours of restored news foam materials, a unique visual recording of the early 20th century, which is constantly in demand by news agencies and documentary filmmakers. Due to the full possession of this archive, Gaumont can repeat it and license -free, which leads to a valuable asset, the income of which is often invested in further restoration.
“These are really extraordinary pictures that are all worthy of the exhibition of the museum,” says Manuela Padoan, President of GP Archives. “Over time, they are viewed as masterpieces – just as essential and priceless as everything in the Louvre. That is why our work requires such care and precision.”

The preservation also requires a serious infrastructure. Gaumont maintains over 4,300 square meters of cooled storage for original negatives that are distributed to three coolers of industrial quality. The cooling system costs more than 114,000 US dollars to maintain annually and is of essential importance for securing nitrate and acetate film.

Since 2013, Gaumont has also invested heavily in digitization and has operated two full -time film scanners. Each film title is scanned in 2K or 4K – sometimes in HDR for improved details – directly from the original camera -negative, the role of roles, then the dye and returned to the memory. This careful restoration process for “zero defects” takes about two weeks for black and white films and up to four weeks for color, followed by an equally detailed classification phase.

The Gaumont restoration team works from a catalog of just more than 1,100 available functions with a further 250 currently triggered due to right-wing problems as DCPS, the backbone of Gaumonts and the consideration of all 610 titles.

Sometimes the team discovers completely new treasures – or at least films that are almost new to everyone who now lives.

Currently in the restoration “La Guerre des Gosses”, an adventure from 1936, which once kept lost. It shows a young Charles Aznavour in his screen debut.

“Esmeralda” is even less common, the first “Hunchback of Notre-Dame” paper, which Alice Guy managed in 1905 and forgotten for a long time-an Italian collector Gaumont gave the last surviving pressure.
“In the end, the goal of a studio with a library like ours is to make these works accessible,” says Jérôme Soulet, President of the Gaumont Library France. “If we leave you on a shelf, we won't do our job.”
In this sense, Gaumont 2022 started its own boutique streaming service, which was dedicated exclusively to the French black and white cinema. Gaumont Classique develops nearby and will soon offer 400 restored titles and 100,000 one -month subscriptions. (Director Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino are said to have both accounts.)