The postman just passed. Maximilien Dumesnil delicately takes reels out of a box. Under these dark films and these yellowed labels hides perhaps – surely! – a treasure. “It’s a 16mm film that we bought on eBay, it seems to be a bicycle race, shot by amateurs in the 1960s or 1970s. This kind of film only exists in one copy , it is therefore unique and unprecedented. »
Maximilien Dumesnil directs The Digital Suite, a small company in the Ainay district (Lyon 2nd) which digitizes private films from old media (film, slides, VHS, etc.). “Working with individuals is fabulous, because we are on the front line, he rejoices. The particularity of amateur films is that their authors had the freedom to film everything, without constraint. And this since the end of the 1920s, while “French television only went to film in the field from the 1940s. There was therefore a long period which was covered only by amateurs, thanks to whom we have been able to constitute a filmed memory of the territories”.
Each family film is a heritage
Marjolaine Chaffard, digitization manager, is just watching a film shot in Lyon in the 1950s. We recognize the Place des Terreaux, where the Bartholdi fountain was in a different location than today… client who brought us this film of her grandfather to digitize it, it had been put away in a box, forgotten in the back of a closet”, explains Maximilien Dumesnil. To those who often ask him if he sometimes sees eccentric things, he admits that we all have “the same story: in family films, there are always children learning to walk, grannies blowing out candles … We all do the same thing, but in a unique way”.
Often, the team unearths absolute rarities. In the back room, the director shows us a shelf filled with large metal boxes of 16 mm reels: “There are 140 films shot in 120 different countries, between the 1940s and 1970s, by a very enlightened amateur. We sometimes meet these people who tell us about a world as we will never know it… Travelers in Guyana, Egypt or Afghanistan who had the audacity to leave with cameras and bring back films! Especially since “filming in Super-8 is not like filming with your phone, it requires dexterity, precision, understanding the light…”
Pelican, an image catalog for producers and directors
Since its opening in 2010, the Digital Suite has built up a unique film heritage. So, as a logical extension, it launched in February 2022 his Pelican project. “It’s a catalog of exceptional animated images taken from all the films we have collected”, explains Maximilien Dumesnil, who calls on individuals “to come and drop off their films: already to save them so that they can transmit them to subsequent generations, but also to constitute a collection”.
An exchange system is proposed: in exchange for the digitization work, which has a certain cost (digitizing a 30-minute super-8 costs about 100 euros), the owner assigns his heritage rights to Pélican, which can then sell the images to audiovisual production companies. “We closed our first sale last week, footage from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand for a documentary series on international drug trafficking. It’s a big production that will be distributed worldwide. » Enough to confirm the existence of a market for archival film, on condition of offering « quality archives, referenced, documented, restored ».
If the Digital Suite ensures the preservation and enhancement of these thousands of hours of archives, it does not forget their inestimable emotional value. “People are attached to their memories, and sometimes struggle to send us their films. They prefer to come and drop them off, to find out who they are going to entrust them to, and what will happen to them. They are therefore invited to push the door of Maximilien Dumesnil, well aware that “what makes the life of a human being is his nostalgia”.