Ciné-Archives

Ciné-Archives, founded in 1998, is the film library of the French Communist Party and workers' movement. Its catalogue includes almost 1,500 titles: fiction and documentary films, amateur and professional films, made by the great names in cinema or by groups opposed to the dominant audiovisual forms. These rare documents, with their great aesthetic diversity and spanning a period from the 1920s to the present day, form a vast mosaic that tells a popular story of the twentieth century in France and around the world.

This selection of 7 films shot between 1936 and 1967 illustrates some of the diversity of the Ciné-Archives collections. It includes fiction films, hybrids combining documentary footage and fictional sketches, and ambitious documentaries. Three periods in the filmography produced by workers' movement organisations are presented here: the Front Populaire, the 1950s, with two fine, less political films designed to circumvent censorship at a time of Cold War, and finally the revival of the 1960s, marked by the influence of television aesthetics and major reportage programmes.