Pathé 9.5 and accessories

[Dominique De Bast]

Some pictures taken at the Fondation Seydoux in Paris. They have a small Pathé museum.

This machine was used to process the films.

[Dominique De Bast]

A machine to measure the films

[Dominique De Bast]

All you need to create your own titles...
The text says : "Do yourself your cinema titles with the lanterne Pathé Baby titra". A "lanterne" is kind of lamp.

[Iain Petrie]

Wonderful looking equipment!

[Dominique De Bast]

[Dominique De Bast]

"développement" means process

[Dominique De Bast]

The enveloppe used to send films to process.

[Janice Glesser]

These photos are wonderful Dominique! I haven't run my Pathe' Baby in awhile and seeing your pics has inspired me to get cranking. Thanks so much!

[Dominique De Bast]

Glad you enjoyed the pictures. It was not easy to take and they are not perfect, I did what I could. I will add a few more of 4.75 and 17,5 machines but that will be from my computer since the phone gives an error message (linked with the memory capacity). Watch this space 😉

[Dominique De Bast]

17.5 projector
17.5 camera. Unfortunatelly, it's not possible to touch it to see it closer.

[Dominique De Bast]

4.75 projector ; Pathé cut 9.5 stock in two to create a new gauge but it was not a success.


I tried to picture the 4.75 stock but it's not allowed to step to close.

[Dominique De Bast]

The text says : "Not a step without Pathé. Make yourself cinema with a Pathé 9.5 camera. It's so easy and cheap."

[Dominique De Bast]

Looks like the two first pictures don't appear anymore (the machine to process 9.5 films and the chemicals). Second attempt :

[Dave Groves]

Fantastic pictures Dom. I remember 9.5 monoplex/duplex being advertised but never saw any evidence of it possibly because Pathescope was already struggling and the opinion at the time seemed to think it was a last gasp effort. I'd have loved to have seen it in operation. Often wondered how successful the projector was. Ingenious, but far too late.

[Dominique De Bast]

It seems that it has not been a commercial success because it was said not easy to operate (imagine, as an example, when you must edit a film as narrow as 4.75 mm...) and the projectors mechanism was complicated not as strong as on other machines since there was a possibility to project horizontaly and vertically. To add to that, the fact that it was not possible to project classic 9.5 stock didn't help. It was possible to project 9.5 vertically but with another perforations system ; instead of the classical one we know, there were two smaller ones (same size as on 4.75, of course). Pathé released this gauge in 1955 as cinemascope was popular at that (4.75 gives a cinemascope size picture) time but it didn't work.