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Nestled in a former theater whose facade was sculpted by Auguste Renoir, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé is dedicated to the preservation, restoration and promotion of film heritage belonging to historical French production company and exhibitor Pathé.

Named after the company’s co-chairman, Jérôme Seydoux, the institution is a nonprofit organization founded in 2006. Designed by renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, the shell-shaped building opened to the public in 2014 and is home to the only cinema theater in France dedicated to silent movies. Two films are screened there every day to live music.

“When we received Pathé’s silent movie catalog in 2015, my husband and I decided to show these movies from around the world because we believe very strongly in the transmission of film heritage,” says the foundation’s president, Sophie Seydoux, the wife of Jérôme.

The foundation also houses 125 years of historical archives, including thousands of posters, catalogs and movie scripts,...

There’s an alarming degree of disingenuousness, or perhaps merely naiveté, permeating “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.” To begin with, there’s that title, “The Untold Story,” which ignores a number of earlier documentaries not to mention the significant amount of scholarship on pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. Also omitted is any mention of the 2009 Gaumont and Kino DVD box sets that made 66 of her films available. These are what can be called inconvenient truths, for Pamela B. Green, director of “Be Natural,” is on a mission to discover why — supposedly — no one has ever heard of Alice Guy-Blaché.

As Green tells it, the reason is pure and simple: Because she was a woman, Guy-Blaché was written out of the history books. That’s not entirely wrong. Alice Guy, as she was then known, was present at the very start of the film industry and played a crucial...

Georges Méliès’ Le Manoir Du Diable signified the dawn of the horror film. A lost film, Esmeralda (1905), the first adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is the offical second installment in the genre. It was created by founding French director Alice Guy-Blaché at the dawn of the 20th Century, who would aid in revolutionizing the art as Gaumont's leading director, and one of the first experimenters with color and special effects in the medium. Her work was succeeded by another adaptation of Hugo's novel in 1911, with an ambitious version by Albert Capellani, another lost film. Though such powerful filmmakers were behind the first explorations into the horror genre on screen (followed by J. Searle Dawley's Frankenstein), it would not be until the early 1920s that horror would even...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Looking back at 2011 on what films moved and impressed us it becomes more and more clear—to me at least—that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, our end of year poll, now an annual tradition, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2011—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2011 to create a unique double feature. Many contributors chose their favorites of 2011, some picked out-of-the-way gems, others made some pretty strange connections—and some frankly just want to create a kerfuffle. All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2011 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative...