A collective memory enabling audiences to discover world cinema, the Cinémathèque works at screening, conserving and restoring this heritage and actively passing on the knowhow.
“I’d like to set up a film archive in Nice, to build a real film library,” said film conservation and restoration pioneer Henri Langlois in 1977. And today the Cinémathèque de Nice screens 350 to 400 films a year, including themed cycles, classic works and recent productions. Foreign films are mostly shown in subtitled original versions and silent-movie masterpieces can be discovered to an accompaniment of live music. Every effort is made to develop understanding of cinematographic language, through analyses of watershed creations, conversations with actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters who reveal their secrets, and masterclasses once a year by a famous contemporary filmmaker. Every three months too, Raphaël Enthoven leads a discovery of great thinkers through the medium of cinema.
Pictures of history
Given how important images are in today’s society, the Cinémathèque plays a proactive role in educating youngsters by running animation-filmmaking workshops and a host of schools activities. “We must try to conserve, save and maintain everything; it’s art and it’s documenting,” opined the founder of this institution now in possession of a vast num-ber of films. With too much disappearing as time passes, the Cinémathèque implements a hands-on policy of conservation and acquisition, especially of films relating to the history of Nice and its region. Thanks to amateur filmmakers immortalising slices of life, scenes and scenery, the Cinémathèque is a repository of irreplaceable testimonies to the Côte d’Azur’s development.
Nice, Acropolis
3 esplanade Kennedy
Tél. 04 92 04 06 66
www.cinematheque-nice.com
Côteweb 2021, création de site Internet sur Nice