The "Gaumont, for as long as cinema has existed" exhibition offers a journey through the history of cinema with pieces from the Gaumont private collection, film extracts, posters, and retrospectives of films in the catalog.
After celebrating its 120th anniversary in 2015 at the Centquatre-Paris, a popular multidisciplinary space, Gaumont took its exhibition on the road—in a variety of formats—across France (Valence, Angoulême, Alpe d'Huez, Lille) and across the globe, to Southeast Asia, Spain, Cuba, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Germany.
It was reinterpreted and adapted to each destination and audience, to fully express the richness of cinema's world heritage.
Because "Gaumont, for as long as cinema has existed" is above all an exhibition about cinema itself. Cinema brimming with beautiful encounters between actors and directors, films and audiences, a story and images.
Its travels included:
SINGAPORE – National Design Centre
The first Gaumont exhibition in Asia!
Staging by Yann Follain, a French architect and museographer. In this vast and bright space, visitors could explore the history of Gaumont through posters, film extracts, a timeline, and a selection of never-before-seen images from the archives of 1920s Singapore.
CUBA – Havana
In 2018, the Gaumont exhibition went to Havana at the same time as the French Film Festival, one of the largest organized outside of France.
An opportunity to present the history of cinema alongside French talent (Pierre Richard, Kad Merad, Mehdi Idir, Jean-Paul Rouve, etc.).
JAPAN – Yokohama/Tokyo
Here, Gaumont's history was reframed against the historical milestones of Japanese cinema.
The exhibition featured posters, photos, costumes, a timeline retracing Gaumont's history, and never-before-seen images from the collection archives, selected specially for a Japanese audience.
CANADA – Montréal
For the Le Monde Festival, Gaumont made a stop in Montréal at the Cinémathèque Québécoise and the Society for Arts and Technology.
The exhibition was accompanied by a unique "digitized" format: a team of professionals in residence (digital project designers, editors, VR developers, sound designers, etc.) created immersive prototypes, broadcast as part of the exhibition inside a "black box" displaying the results of this experiment, thus offering a new perspective on Gaumont's heritage.
MEXICO – National Cinematheque of Mexico
7535 square feet of exhibition, a timeline 328 feet long, 200 original objects, 5 hours of audiovisual content, a retrospective of 30 films, and a reinstallation of the immersive experience created in Montréal. "Gaumont, desde que existe el cine" was also an exploration of the chronomegaphone, an extraordinary apparatus created at the start of the 20th century to amplify sound. Something of a homecoming for this unique tool, which was the subject of a major tour in Central America between 1912 and 1913.
A large-scale project that forged a new visual identity, for a unique exhibition.
GERMANY – Institut Français Berlin/Maison de France
Since cinema is a breeding ground for innovation and creation, the exhibition "Gaumont: seit es das Kino gibt" was accompanied by an immersive project: the organization of a "hackathon" workshop. During this creative residency, artists could reinterpret images from masterpieces in the Gaumont catalog and design a new immersive experience, made available to the public in a "black box" made of 3 sides of simultaneous screenings.
Furthermore, the Institut Français hosted Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache for an event about their filmography, as well as Vincent Cassel, the star of their film The Specials.
A journey in pictures of the different projects.
