When the US film director Martin Scorsese inaugurated the new French Cinémathèque, he called it "the spiritual home of film-makers the world over". The Cinémathèque was founded in 1936, with a mission to preserve, restore and show films. The film-makers of the 'New Wave' - Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer - met there in the early 1950s.
The culture minister André Malraux told the National Assembly in 1959 that the vocation of the Cinémathèque was to enable "any young man to see, in two or three years, the hundred most beautiful films that the world has produced". Malraux funded a new location, in the Palais de Chaillot complex overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. From its opening in 1963 until it closed last February, the Chaillot Cinémathèque was a fixture of French culture, evocative of Bohemian students and Parisian intellectuals.
Gen de Gaulle received a rude introduction to the Cinémathèque's clannish esoterism when he tried to replace its director, Henri Langlois, in 1968. Five demonstrations followed, led by the cinema greats Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jeanne Moreau, Bertrand Tavernier and Simone Signoret. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Cinémathèque fell foul of French bureaucracy. A plan to install the cinema and a film museum in the Palais de Tokyo was abandoned after 12 years.
The new location is an asymmetrical building designed by Frank Gehry, for the American Cultural Centre. It went bankrupt in the mid-1990s and was purchased by the French state. The adaptation for the Cinémathèque, overseen by the French architect Dominique Brard, has taken seven years.
The new Cinémathèque (below) holds four screening rooms, each seating between 60 and 400 people. Between now and the end of the year, it will show the entire cinematographic oeuvre of Jean Renoir, as well as retrospectives dedicated to Michael Caine, David Cronenberg and Douglas Sirk. The Permanent History of Cinema section will screen 300 film classics repeatedly. A Giants of the West festival will show Westerns at lunch time. The public can also view films in the "Bifi" film and image library.
After the exhibition devoted to the Renoirs, father and son, the exhibition space on the top floor will pay homage to the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and German expressionism.
