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
Pathé SAS (; styled as PATHÉ!) is a French major film production and distribution company, owning a number of cinema chains through its subsidiary Pathé Cinémas and television networks across Europe.
It is the name of a network of Fren ...
, its roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Pathé and his brothers pioneered the development of the
moving image. Pathé adopted the
national emblem of France
The coat of arms of France is an unofficial emblem of the French Republic. It depicts a lictor's fasces upon branches of laurel and oak, as well as a ribbon bearing the national motto of . The full achievement includes the star and grand coll ...
, the
cockerel, as the trademark for his company. The
firm
A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members ...
, as Compagnie Générale des Éstablissements Pathé Frères Phonographes & Cinématographes, invented the cinema newsreel with ''Pathé-Journal''.
Early life
The son of a butcher shop owner, Charles Morand Pathé was born at
Chevry-Cossigny, in the
Seine-et-Marne
Seine-et-Marne () is a department in the ÃŽle-de-France region in Northern France. Named after the rivers Seine and Marne, it is the region's largest department with an area of 5,915 square kilometres (2,284 square miles); it roughly covers its ...
''
département'' of France. His father, Jacques Pathé and mother, Thérèse-Émélie Kech were butchers by trade, and ran a delicatessen first in Chevry-Cossigny, and later in
Vincennes. Charles had three brothers and two sisters.
Business ventures
Pathé left school at 14 to work as an apprentice butcher, at rue de Charenton, Paris. After military service, in 1889, at 25, he began working as a meat merchant but soon took his savings, and with the help of his brothers and his sister, embarked for Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the aim of setting up in business.
Pathé tried to establish himself in various trades including a laundry service based on industrial washing machines that turned out to be unsuccessful. His life was unsettled and Pathé was forced to change jobs frequently. After a final failure of trying to deal in exotic parrots, when he and his business partner were stricken with
yellow fever, Pathé returned to France in poor health.
At age 30, Pathé married lle Foy in Paris, and worked as a clerk, drawing a meager salary.
Sound recording
Back in Vincennes, in August 1894, Pathé saw the phonograph invented by
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February11, 1847October18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, ...
, demonstrated at the town fair. He immediately embraced the sound recording technology, purchasing examples of Edison machines to resell. In 1896, with his brothers Émile, Théophile and Jacques, Pathé founded
Société Pathé Frères (Pathé Brothers) in Paris, a company that manufactured and sold phonographs and phonograph cylinders, with
Émile Pathé at his head.
Cinema
While in London, Pathé saw the
Edison Kinetoscope and decided to expand the Pathé company's business to distributing
cinema projection equipment, and with the acquisition of
Eastman Kodak
The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...
patent rights in Europe, a licence for film stock in theatres throughout France. Pathé films were rented out, for a maximum of four months, a more lucrative business than selling the product.
[Lanzoni 2004, p. 36.] A modest first factory had been installed in 1896 at Vincennes. The first films of the Société Pathé Frères such as ''Le Passage à niveau à Joinville le Pont'' and ''L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de Bel-Air'' were produced, under Pathé's guidance. For several years, however, the success of the phonograph business underwrote the success of the cinema company.
On 28 December 1897, Société Pathé Frères was re-capitalised and set up as a combination of production, film laboratories, technical services and distribution of films. From 1902 to 1904, Pathé opened branches in Europe and in the United States, with their trademark Gallic cock logo created in 1905, recognized as heralding one of the world's most significant filmmakers. In 1906, Pathé Frères began to establish a global enterprise with Segundo de Chomón founded the Spanish branch in Barcelona, and four years later Pathé entered the US market with Pathé-America, based in New Jersey, branch offices in other countries followed.
From its origin, Pathé Frères began using the camera developed by
Lumière brothers
Lumière is French for 'light'.
Lumiere, Lumière or Lumieres may refer to:
Buildings
* Lumière, a building used by the Bibliothèque publique d'information in Paris, France
* Lumiere (skyscraper), a cancelled skyscraper development in Leeds, ...
' patents and then set about to design an improved studio camera and to make their own film stock. From 1901, Pathé teamed up with director and later manager
Ferdinand Zecca who oversaw the creation and production of original Pathé Frères films. From 1905 on, the company employed specialized studio staff: screenwriters, directors, cinematographers and other technicians.
Zecca explored many themes from the mundane to the fantastic. In ''
À la conquête de l'air'' (1901), a strange flying machine, called ''Fend-l'air'', was seen flying over the rooftops of
Belleville. By using trick photography, the one-minute short was notable in being the first aviation film, predating the flight by the
Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers, Orville Wright (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur Wright (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912), were American aviation List of aviation pioneers, pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flyin ...
by two years.
[Paris 1995, p. 11.]
Zecca also pioneered one of the first crime dramas, ''
Histoire d'un crime'' (1901), stylistically innovative in its use of superimposition. The story was of a man condemned to death, awaiting execution with his crimes appearing on his cell wall. The film is an early example of
flashbacks as a film device.
["The rise of French cinema."](_blank)
''brevestoriadelcinema''. Retrieved: 1 January 2017. Other films included comedies, trick films or fairy tales, such as ''Les Sept châteaux du Diable'', both 1901, and ''La Belle au bois dormant'' in 1902, as well as social dramas like ''
Les Victimes de l'alcoolisme'' (1902), ''Au pays noir'' (1905) and reconstructions of actual events, the most famous being ''La Catastrophe de la Martinique'' (1902).
Zecca acted in many of his films. At the end of 1906, assisted by the Spaniard Segundo de Chomón's photography and special effects, Zecca continued to experiment. He co-directed ''
La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ'' (1903), which, at a running time of 44 minutes, was one of the first feature-length films about Jesus. He started filming in colour, with second ''Vie et Passion de N.S. Jésus Christ'', shot in four parts with 38 scenes, 990 metres long, which was finished in 1907.
Between 1900 and 1907, Zecca oversaw the production of hundreds of Pathé films from many important Pathé directors including Nonguet Lucien, Gaston Velle, Albert Capellani, Louis J. Gasnier, André Heuzé and Henri Pouctal. Zecca also acted, directed, produced, and, on occasion, wrote films. After Pathé bought the rights to Star films, Zecca started editing films by
George Méliès. Film production went from 70 titles in 1901 to 500 in 1903; after 1906, the mass film production gradually eased as longer films were produced.
Pathé Frères filmed numerous short subjects, the majority of which are sensational criminal adventures, melodramatic love stories, and comedies. In 1909 Pathé produced his first feature or "long film," ''Les Misérables'', a four-reel screen version of the novel by
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romanticism, Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.
His most famous works are the novels ''The Hunchbac ...
. That same year he created the Pathé Gazette in France (called Pathé News in the U.S. set up in 1910 and in the U.K. (now British Pathé) in 1911), which was an internationally popular newsreel until 1956.
[Austin 1996, p. 3.]
In 1912, Pathé appointed the director
Alfred Machin to develop the first studio films at
Karreveld Castle in
Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
(French language, French, ) or (Dutch language, Dutch, ), often simply called Molenbeek, is one of the List of municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. Located in the western p ...
, Belgium. In 1914, Pathé Frères studios in the United States released the first episodes of ''
The Perils of Pauline'', one of the earliest and best remembered screen serials. The company also began publishing the screen magazine ''Pathé Pictorial''. When Pathé Exchange was spun off from its French parent company in 1921, with a controlling stake held by
Merrill Lynch
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, doing business as Merrill, and previously branded Merrill Lynch, is an American investment management and wealth management division of Bank of America. Along with BofA Securities, the investm ...
, Charles Pathé stayed on as a director of the American firm.
[ Mira Wilkins, ''The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945'', p. 89]
In 1929, Charles Pathé sold out his interest in his businesses and retired to
Monaco
Monaco, officially the Principality of Monaco, is a Sovereign state, sovereign city-state and European microstates, microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Regions of Italy, Italian region of Liguria, in Western Europe, ...
. He died there on Christmas Day 1957, one day before his 94th birthday.
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
* Austin, Guy. ''Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction''. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996. .
* Gordon, Rae Beth. ''Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema''. Palo Alto, California:Stanford University Press, 2002. .
* Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier. ''
French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present''. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. .
* Paris, Michael. ''From the Wright Brothers to Top gun: Aviation, Nationalism, and Popular Cinema.'' Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995. .
* Rège, Philippe. ''Encyclopedia of French Film Directors'', Volume 1. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2009. .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pathe, Charles
1863 births
1957 deaths
People from Seine-et-Marne
French cinema pioneers
French film producers
French businesspeople
French emigrants to Monaco
French film production company founders