British Pathé is considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world. Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news, and this is how the story of newsreel began. The name Pathé originates from a network of French businesses run by the Pathé Brothers in 1896. The company was established as Société Pathé Frères in Paris by the four Pathé brothers Charles, Émile, Théophile and Jacques. During the first decades of the 20th century Pathé was the largest film equipment and production company in the world – as well as a major producer of phonograph records. They were the tech pioneers of their time and were introducing innovation across all branches of the audiovisual sector while laying the first foundations of modern media industry.

Archiviogenico
Archive footage is often understood as a visual record of the past — a “capture” of people and events fixed in space and time, preserved, catalogued, and stored within a footage library, ready to be revisited whenever a project calls for relevant extracts. It is commonly used to illustrate a narrative, reinforce a point of view, or serve as an unexpected witness to forgotten facts. In this sense, archival footage can also lend credibility to contemporary statements by grounding them in documented traces of the past.
This short collection seeks instead to isolate fleeting or “offbeat” moments filmed by British Pathé camera crews — not to remove them from their historical context in order to judge or reinterpret them retrospectively, but to magnify what the camera inadvertently captured: gestures, expressions, and fragments of human presence that reveal a more universal and intimate dimension. These moments resist becoming obsolete or reduced to fixed truths simply because they belong to the past.
The selected snippets also invite reflection on conditions and events that have gradually disappeared into the fabric of time. By shifting perspective, they encourage us to reconsider who we are in relation to those who came before us. This form of selective observation becomes a kind of mental exercise — one that sharpens our intellectual agility and allows us to step back, recognise continuities across generations, and rediscover the shared traits that connect us with our predecessors.

Eric Cambronne

License Executive at British Pathé. Represents the British Pathé newsreel archive library and supports film & documentary makers, producers, researchers and archive enthusiasts in their projects and content creation.
British Pathé is home to a treasure trove of news films from the 20th century. Spanning the years from 1896-1978, the entire archive collection of 85,000 films includes authentic footage from around the globe of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, science, and culture and more.