All films from: Département des Hauts-de-Seine/Musée départemental Albert-Kahn
(Collection des Archives de la Planète).
Digitization: Hiventy, 2019; supervised by Frédérique Le Bris, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn.
All film notes by Teresa Castro, Anne Sigaud.

INDES BRITANNIQUES, BÉNARÈS, “LES BAIGNEURS”
photog: Stéphane Passet. riprese/filmed: 01.1914. copia/copy: DCP, 9’40” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 197 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 119990]
INDES BRITANNIQUES, BÉNARÈS, “LES BAIGNEURS”
photog: Stéphane Passet. riprese/filmed: 01.1914. copia/copy: DCP, 7’52” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 161 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 119991]
The autochrome photographer and cameraman Stéphane Passet, employed by Albert Kahn from 1913 to 1919, was sent to British India between December 1913 and February 1914, where he became intrigued by local religious practices. In Benares, he devoted some 400 metres of film to ritual ablutions by the banks of the Ganges, and the scenes were privately screened for Albert Kahn in Boulogne-sur-Seine in May 1914, under the titles “baignade” (bathing) and “bains sacrés” (sacred baths). The period positives we have are simply copies of the negatives that were spliced end to end on two separate reels, in no particular order.

FRANCE, PARIS, PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, “FÊTES DE LA VICTOIRE”
photog: Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 14.07.1919. copia/copy: DCP, 3’07” (da/from 35mm nitr. neg., 65 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 141057]
FRANCE, PARIS, AVENUE DES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES, “DÉFILÉ DE LA VICTOIRE”
photog: Lucien Le Saint. riprese/filmed: 14.07.1919. copia/copy: DCP, 16’22” (da/from 35mm interpositivo/fine grain master, da/from nitr. neg., 337 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 127462]
During the First World War, France’s national film services, patriotic associations, and commercial studios pooled their resources in the name of national propaganda. Albert Kahn’s private organization was thus given a contributing role. The varied and fragmentary material in the war collection of the Archives de la Planète offers a fair reflection of the constant movement of negatives, edited films, cameramen, and their equipment from one sector to another.
Lucien Le Saint and Camille Sauvageot were two emblematic figures in this context. Working together as cameramen for the civilian and military sectors, they were then recruited as employees of Albert Kahn after being demobilized in late 1919.
On 14 July 1919, during the great Victory celebrations, Sauvageot filmed the parade of Allied troops and the jubilant crowd from the rooftop of the Centre d’Action de Propagande contre l’Ennemi, a state agency located at 8 Place de la Concorde. Le Saint was positioned in front of the Arc de Triomphe, filming the march-past on behalf of the Union des Grandes Associations contre la Propagande Ennemie. The negatives from these two shoots were developed, printed, and stored at Albert Kahn’s.

FRANCE, PARIS, “INCENDIE DES MAGASINS DU PRINTEMPS”
photog: Lucien Le Saint, Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 28.09.1921. copia/copy: DCP, 3’17” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 67 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 121048]
During the war, Albert Kahn had the idea for a grand “documentary” project intended to enlighten global political powers and guarantee the maintenance of world peace. In 1919 he began to assemble printed records, to which in 1920 he added the Archives de la Planète, at the heart of a Centre de Documentation with a “photographic and cinematographic section” that continued to function along the collaborative lines practiced during the war.
Within the institution, a number of cameramen worked for Albert Kahn himself, or for his circle (his scientific advisor Jean Brunhes, his family and business partners, the people behind his philanthropic and academic foundations); sometimes they were hired by the Foreign Ministry or the Ministry of War. Professional instinct could also prompt cameramen to spontaneously cover specific current events, as was probably the case with the fire that tore through one of the great sites of Parisian life in 1921, the Printemps department store.

FRANCE, PARIS, ARC DE TRIOMPHE, “LE GÉNÉRAL PERSHING REMET LA MÉDAILLE DU CONGRÈS AU SOLDAT INCONNU”
photog: Lucien Le Saint, Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 02.10.1921. copia/copy: DCP, 5’36” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 115 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 118320]
Le Saint and Sauvageot retained their method of shooting with two cameras, as they had done during the Great War. This allowed them to create dynamic editing, another legacy of their experience with the war propaganda service, which was nothing less than a training school for documentary film-making.
The people in Albert Kahn’s circle were particularly sensitive to the evolving international situation and especially to Franco-American relations. They appreciated the significance of the tribute paid by the United States Congress to France’s Unknown Soldier in 1921 with the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and in the general climate of declining relations between traditional allies, this manifestation of fraternité had significant value, given the high political and economic stakes of the time.

FRANCE, GARCHES (RÉGION PARISIENNE), “LA FERME DU COMTE IGNATIEF”
photog: Lucien Le Saint, Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 13 + 23.02.1921. copia/copy: DCP, 6’10” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 128 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 120195]
The principal scenes here were shot by Lucien Le Saint on 13 February 1921, and Camille Sauvageot shot complementary material, especially landscapes, ten days later.
This film depicts members of the Ignatieff family, Russian aristocrats who following the establishment of the Soviet government took refuge in France, where they spent time as gentlemen farmers. Since the 1917 Revolution, the situation in Russia was of recurring concern to Albert Kahn and his circle, which included a number of socialist-leaning but rigorously anti-Bolshevik individuals. One thus finds regular contact and collaboration with aristocrats or émigré Mensheviks in the period 1919-1921.

FRANCE, PARIS, “ÉCLIPSE PARTIELLE DU SOLEIL DU 8 AVRIL 1921”
photog: Lucien Le Saint, Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 31.03, 01.04, 08.04.1921. copia/copy: DCP, 9’57” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 205 m.); did./titles: FRA. [Inv. 119615]
Preparing this shoot, Lucien Le Saint carried out preliminary technical tests in Albert Kahn’s garden. One of them, “the sun and its path through space”, was appended to the end of the present material, no doubt for the sake of consistency in terms of storage and future film classification.
On the day of the partial solar eclipse, Le Saint shot the images of the sky and composed the intertitles, while Camille Sauvageot filmed “Parisians watching the phenomenon through smoked glass”. In its technical, experimental, and didactic aspects – comparable to the fully evolving genre of scientific and educational films – this production stands apart from the images of the event released at the same time by news agencies.

TURQUIE, CONSTANTINOPLE
photog: Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 11-12.1922. copia/copy: DCP, 10’49” (da/from 35mm nitr. neg., 224 m.); senza did./no titles. [Inv. 90807]
Camille Sauvageot and the autochrome photographer Frédéric Gadmer were sent to Turkey from 20 October 1922 to 17 February 1923. They covered Constantinople and soon became interested in the activities of Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]’s government in Anatolia. They then travelled through Asia Minor to film the devastating consequences of the recent Greek-Turkish war. We do not know how their mission was planned, but the images suggest support for the policy of Franco-Turkish rapprochement, a topic of debate in Albert Kahn’s circle.
This film is a rough cut made in the 1970s from part of the negatives shot in Constantinople.

FRANCE, PARIS, CIMETIÈRE DU PÈRE-LACHAISE, “MANIFESTATION AU MUR DES FÉDÉRÉS À L’OCCASION DE L’ANNIVERSAIRE DE LA COMMUNE”
photog: Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 24.05.1925. copia/copy: DCP, 4’56” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 101 m.); did./titles: FRA. [Inv. 126044]
Lucien Le Saint left the Archives de la Planète in 1923, and although other cameramen worked for Albert Kahn, here Camille Sauvageot was filming alone.
The “montée au Mur des Fédérés” – a march up to the so-called “Wall of the Communards” in the Père Lachaise Cemetery – is an annual event held by the revolutionary-pacifist wing of the French Left to commemorate the mass execution which took place there at the end of the Paris Commune uprising in 1871.
The event was filmed for the Archives de la Planète in 1919, 1922, and 1925. The intended destination and use of this material remain unknown.

SUISSE, LOCARNO, “LA CONFÉRENCE POUR LE PACTE DE SÉCURITÉ”
photog: Camille Sauvageot. riprese/filmed: 03-17.10.1925. copia/copy: DCP, 10’41” (da/from 35mm nitr. pos., 220 m.); did./titles: FRA. [Inv. 75707]
The Locarno Pact marks an important turning-point in the inter-war period in Europe, reintroducing a formal dialogue between Germany, four former Allies, and two successor states, all preoccupied with guaranteeing the stability of Germany’s borders. The treaties, which promised a general détente in the international political climate, also heralded Germany’s prospective membership of the League of Nations and the establishment of a new international order. For both Albert Kahn – an early activist for Franco-German rapprochement and a precocious promoter of the League – and his milieu, the event represented a philosophical and political victory.
The montage of this film is constructed along similar lines and includes images resembling those released by the news agencies, but it is unusually long (about 20 minutes). Only the first part is presented here.