Cinema and video

• See films
• About films
• Gathering information about cinema

Cinema and video: see films

As well fiction, documentaries, and recordings of performances, BnF also collects institutional communication films, films produced by companies and associations, and video art. For example, it holds the collection of the Centre Simone de Beauvoir and all titles produced by the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique.

This collection of 150,000 titles is available for viewing in the Research library at the François Mitterrand Library (Site François-Mitterrand). Originally consisting of a variety of types of video media, it is now almost entirely digital. It includes such rareties as a performance by Zouk recorded in Bobino in January 1981, and Marcel Carné’s “Le pays d’où je viens” with Gilbert Bécaud.

It also includes a multimedia collection, mainly consisting of journals accompanied by VHS cassettes or DVDs, covering a wide variety of genres: comedy, fantasy, science fiction, horror, epics, karate, western, etc., together with TV series (e.g. Maigret, Le Saint, etc.) and cinema classics (the “Légendes d’Hollywood” collection).

The open-access collection at the Reference library enables visitors to view, in particular, literary adaptations (e.g. Marcel Bluwal’s “Dom Juan” with Michel Piccoli and Claude Brasseur), films dedicated to all forms of music, and a “documentary film library” consisting of films that have marked the history of the genre (from Jean Painlevé’s “L’hippocampe” to Raymond Depardon’s “Profils paysans”). Also available are major film titles on DVD that are of particular interest for the quality of their editing (film restoration and selection of bonus materials).