Pathé News was a producer of
newsreels and
documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
. Its founder,
Charles Pathé
Charles Morand Pathé (; 26 December 1863 – 25 December 1957) was a pioneer of the French film and recording industries. As the founder of Pathé Frères, its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Pathé and his brothers pioneered the dev ...
, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as British Pathé. Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online.
History
Its roots lie in 1896
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...
,
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...
, when
Société Pathé Frères
Lactalis is a French Multinational corporation, multinational dairy products corporation, owned by the Besnier family and based in Laval, Mayenne, France. The company's former name was Besnier SA.
Lactalis is the largest dairy products group in ...
was founded by
Charles Pathé
Charles Morand Pathé (; 26 December 1863 – 25 December 1957) was a pioneer of the French film and recording industries. As the founder of Pathé Frères, its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Pathé and his brothers pioneered the dev ...
and his brothers, who pioneered the development of the moving image. Charles Pathé adopted the national emblem of France,
the cockerel, as the trademark for his company. After the company, now called Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frère Phonographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with ''Pathé-Journal''. French Pathé began its newsreel in 1908 and opened a newsreel office in
Wardour Street, London in 1910.
The newsreels were shown in the cinema and were silent until 1928. At first, they ran for about four minutes and were issued fortnightly. During the early days, the camera shots were taken from a stationary position but the Pathé newsreels captured events such as
Franz Reichelt's fatal parachute jump from the
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower ( ; french: links=yes, tour Eiffel ) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
Locally nickname ...
and suffragette
Emily Davison's fatal injury by a racehorse at the 1913
Epsom Derby
The Derby Stakes, also known as the Epsom Derby or the Derby, and as the Cazoo Derby for sponsorship reasons, is a Group 1 flat horse race in England open to three-year-old colts and fillies. It is run at Epsom Downs Racecourse in Surrey ...
.
During the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fig ...
, the cinema newsreels were called the ''Pathé Animated Gazettes'', and for the first time this provided newspapers with competition. After 1918, British Pathé started producing a series of cinemazines, in which the newsreels were much longer and more comprehensive. By 1930, British Pathé was covering news, entertainment, sport, culture, and women's issues through programmes including the ''Pathétone Weekly'', the ''Pathé Pictorial'', the ''Gazette'' and ''Eve’s Film Review''.
In 1927, the company sold British Pathé (both the feature film and the newsreel divisions) to
First National. (French Pathé News continued until 1980, and the library is now part of the
Gaumont-Pathé collection.) Pathé changed hands again in 1933, when it was acquired by British International Pictures, which was later known as
Associated British Picture Corporation. In 1958, it was sold again to
Warner Bros. and became Warner-Pathé. Pathé eventually stopped producing the cinema newsreel in February 1970 as it could no longer compete with television. During the newsreels' run, the narrators included
Bob Danvers-Walker,
Dwight Weist, Dan Donaldson,
André Baruch and
Clem McCarthy among others.
Digitisation
The library itself was sold with Associated British Picture to
EMI Films and then others, including
The Cannon Group (which split the feature film and newsreel divisions) and the
Daily Mail and General Trust
Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) is a British multinational media company, the owner of the ''Daily Mail'' and several other titles. The 4th Viscount Rothermere is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the company. The head office is ...
, before relaunching in its own right in 2009. The feature film division is now part of
StudioCanal and is not connected with
Pathé, the French company and original parent of British Pathé. In 2002, partially funded by the UK
National Lottery, the entire archive was digitised. The British Pathé archive now holds over 3,500 hours of filmed history, 90,000 individual items and 12 million stills. On 7 February 2009, British Pathé launched a
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...
channel of its newsreel archive.
From March 2010, British Pathé relaunched its archive as an online entertainment site, making Pathé News a service for the public as well as the broadcasting industry. In May 2010, ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide ...
'' was given access to the British Pathé archive, hosting topical videos on its website. In May 2012, British Pathé won the
FOCAL International Award for Footage Library of the Year. In April 2014, British Pathé uploaded the entire collection of 85,000 historic films to its YouTube channel as part of a drive to make the archive more accessible to viewers all over the world. As of 2021, the British Pathé YouTube channel had 822 million views and more than 2 million subscribers.
By 2020, the British Pathé archive now includes material from the
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was est ...
historical collection. Additionally, as historically the British Pathé newsreels covered events in the island of Ireland, while it was variously part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Irish Free State, and later a Republic, that part of the archive was shared with the
Irish Film Institute's
Irish Film Archive, curated as ''The Irish Independence Film Collection''. This also resulted in a more accurate cataloguing of the locations, people, and the historical context, than the UK office would have historically had.
Television use
British Pathé produced a number of programmes and series as well as newsreels, such as ''Pathé Eve'' and ''Astra Gazette''. In 2010,
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It was launched on 2 March 2002 reversioned the 1950s Pathé series ''Time To Remember'', which was narrated by the actor
Stanley Holloway, and broadcast it as a thematic 12-part series.
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broad ...
continues to use extracts in its coverage of various events, such as Windrush, and World War II.
Name changes
British Pathé has been known under the following names:
* C.G.P.C. (1910–1927)
* First National-Pathé (1927–1933)
* Associated British-Pathé/RKO-Pathé (1933–1958)
* Warner-Pathé (1958–1970)
* British Pathé News (1990–1995)
* British Pathé (since 1995)
Pathé News in America
The U.S. version of ''Pathé News'', which began in 1911 as ''Pathé Weekly'', was no longer associated with the British version and Pathé Frères' other newsreels around the world after 1921, when Pathé Frères' American subsidiary,
Pathé Exchange
Pathé Exchange, commonly known as Pathé, was an American film production and distribution company, largely of Hollywood's silent era. Known for its groundbreaking newsreel and wide array of shorts, it grew out of the American division of the ...
, was spun off as an independent business.
RKO Radio Pictures
RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orph ...
acquired the twice-weekly ''Pathé News'' along with most of the rest of the Pathé Exchange assets in 1931, rebranding it ''RKO Pathé News''. In 1947,
Warner Bros. purchased the newsreel from RKO, rebranding it in turn as ''Warner Pathé News''. Warner also produced a series of 38 theatrical short subjects and 81 issues of the ''News Magazine of the Screen'' series, which added to the Pathé film properties and were part of the company's extensive film library. Producer/editor
Robert Youngson
Robert Youngson (November 27, 1917 – April 8, 1974) was a film producer, director, and screenwriter, specializing in reviving antique silent films.Obituary ''Variety'', April 17, 1974, page 95.[Academy Awards
The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...]
for them.
In 1956, Warner Bros. discontinued the production of the theatrical newsreel and sold the Pathé News film library, the 38 theatrical short subjects, the ''Pathé News Magazine of the Screen'', the crowing rooster trademark and the copyrights and other properties to Studio Films, Inc.—shortly thereafter named Pathé Pictures, Inc.— At this time, the new owners, Barnett Glassman, Samuel A. Costello and Joseph P. Smith acquired ownership and subsequently re-branded the name and film properties of both companies to Pathé News, Inc.
A 50% interest in the Pathé News Film Library was sold to Sherman Grinberg in 1958. The Sherman Grinberg Film Library licensed the marketing rights to the Pathé News Film Library. Pathé News, Inc retained the sole exclusive right to sell the library. The series of 38 theatrical short subjects and 81 issues of the ''News Magazine of the Screen'' series, ''Milestones of the Century'', the ''Men of Destiny'' series, ''Showtime at the Apollo'', as well as many other titles are marketed by Historic Films Archive, LLC.
In 2016, the children of Joseph P. Smith, acquired 100% of the stock. Today, Pathé News, Inc. is a family-owned private company.
Other U.S. newsreel series included
Paramount News (1927–1957),
Fox Movietone News (1928–1963),
Hearst Metrotone News/News of the Day (1914–1967),
Universal Newsreel
Universal Newsreel (sometimes known as Universal-International Newsreel or just U-I Newsreel) was a series of 7- to 10-minute newsreels that were released twice a week between 1929 and 1967 by Universal Studios. A Universal publicity official, ...
(1929–1967) and ''
The March of Time'' (1935–1951).
See also
*
Oliver G. Pike – filmmaker for British Pathé
References
External links
*
British Pathé History*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pathe News
Newsreels
British film studios
Articles containing video clips