La Cinémathèque Française

Outside the Cinémathèque Française, designed by Frank GehryThe Cinémathèque Française is the center of French cinema and a mecca for cinephiles worldwide. For the past few years, it’s been housed in a big angular stone-and-glass building in the twelfth arrondissement, a much more modern area of Paris that used to be pretty industrial but is now more high-end, and has become a sort of cultural center in eastern Paris (the François Mittérrand national library and the biggest stadium/music venue in Paris are nearby). The building used to belong to the American cultural center in Paris, who sold it to Cinémathèque Française at a big loss because they couldn’t pay for all the maintenance; now the French government helps pay for the upkeep costs, and there no longer exists an American cultural center in France.

I first went to the Cinémathèque Française during our two-week preliminary course, before regular classes started. I had to do a presentation on the photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon, and so I went to watch one of his films, Profils Paysans, at the Cinémathèque’s Bibliothèque du Film, or library of film. At first the building was confusing, and then simply intimidating (a friend had told me that it was the new favorite place for Parisian hipsters), but I paid three euros for a ticket at the BiFi desk, put my coat and bag in a locker in the coat room, and asked for Profils Paysans by its number in the giant binders of films by title or director. In exchange for my license, I was given the DVD and a booth with a pretty large TV, a DVD player, a VCR, and two sets of headphones. I’ve since gotten used to the ritual of watching a film at the BiFi, and I go back almost every Monday morning to watch a film for my cinema class.

Of course, the Cinémathèque Française also has an actual cinéma, a movie theatre that plays mostly retrospectives: Fellini, Michael Haneke, actors of the Nouvelle Vague (I saw Roger Vadim’s … And God Created Woman there last month). There’s also a small museum of cinema, with century-old movie-making machines and clips of Charlie Chaplin films; and there’s a really nice café, with chalkboard walls, long tables, and some of the cheaper hot drinks in Paris. I imagine I’ll find myself there tomorrow after I watch the next film for class, probably drinking an espresso.

Location