Cinema Chez Soi

CINÉMA CHEZ SOI

 I have come to this page as part of the update after the Great Software Disaster of 2015. I am not sure in retrospect why I chose some of the pictures I did for this page, but I have largely left them alone,  apart from reducing the image size to suit Joomla!'s delicate digestion and adding copies of the last two "pre-war" (though actually during the war) Issues.

I have completed the task of scanning all the pre-war (and a couple during-the-war) editions of Le Cinéma Chez Soi, the French magzine that filled much the same role as Pathescope Monthly/Gazette. There is still a long way to go, as I think the pictures below wilI demonstrate.  Quite apart from the very poor print quality of CCS, which results in damage, deterioration and discolouration, the digitisation process itself can introduce problems. When you see below the amount of work that sometimes is needed to produce a decent copy of many pages per issue, you will understand why it has taken me so long - a bit too much perfectionism maybe. Even with much photoshopping, some images are so poor little or nothing can be made of them.

Nonetheless, I think CCS is a better mag than PM/G being a) bigger, and b) while not escaping the smug, self-satisfied condescension of Pathescope UK, at least has some technical and other material of interest, largely absent from PMG. The French also go overboard when it comes to smarming around politicians. Anyway, that is mostly diatribe by way of introduction.

As the observant will know, I scanned a great many Issues of CCS a while back and made them available on DVD-Rom (too much to fit on a CD). This was possible thanks to Grahame Newnham, who made many Issues available and Pat Moules, who began to acquire copies. These DVD's were far from complete, with many issues missing but my own efforts have been greatly supplemented by Pat and by Mikael Barnard, who have both acquired full or virtually full paper sets.

This brings us of course to a very basic question; is it worth doing this? I tend to the view that the archiving and preservation of ephemera, in which I include CCS, PMG and adverts, instructions and repair manuals for projectors and other mags like Flickers, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Amateur Cine World, Amateur Cine Enthusiast, 9.5 and possibly many others, is sadly neglected. I suppose I must be influenced a lot by my interest in projectors; there are virtually no books (for every book about projectors there are at least one gazillion about films) and I value any source of info. You see the same sort of urge in my work on 28mm catalogues and things like the Pathé French 1928 catlog (available on disc) and the various stuff like early English catlogs wot I hav put on this site. I sometimes wonder what the point is, since cine as we have known it is gone, and when the rest of us BOFs (Boring Old expletive deleteds) have gone, there will be virtually no-one interested. I spose at the end of the day it's just another aspect of the cine bug and anyway, I actually get a lot of enjoyment out of it, mostly to do with the challenge of achieving decent digital copies from elderly and decrepit paper copies. I have learned a great deal in the process.

There are many problems of scanning/digitisation, but I thought I would just show you some of what can be done (ignoring for now any question of if it should be done and whether digital fiddling is legitimate). And indeed, some of the limits to what can be done. I have usually kept before and after pix, tho' sometimes I missed. I am particularly proud of the ones below where great strips of a cover picture were missing and I was able to fix them up. Since then, naturally, I have had access to better copies anyway.........

All this is, of course, extremely time-consuming, even with the use of cribs and templates such as below. I use an old programme called ArcSoft Photo Studio, which does all I want with the sole exception that it will not rotate pictures by less than a whole degree. As the original printing, let alone the scanning, is often out of kilter, I have to turn to Adobe Photoshop for this operation. I have mentioned elsewhere the particular problem of some of the very early Supplements to the French catlog. Other examples can be found with PMG.

Finally, here are the last 3 issues, mostly with raw scans untouched by photoshop.