THE WORLD'S BIGGEST MUSEUM
Hello.
The National Audiovisual Institute, or the INA, is a marvelous place.
Imagine that here at Bry-sur-Marne, you can find
over 3 million hours of radio and TV programs.
The INA is the world's biggest audiovisual center.
All the emotions that you've ever felt while listening to the radio
or watching a TV program have been collected and archived here.
The INA is at the heart of the subject
that has entertained us so many years: heritage.
Why? Because the INA is a small part of our collective memory.
Come on, let's go.
TRAIL OF STARS
BELPHEGOR
Here we are in Emmanuel Hoog's office. Hello, Emmanuel Hoog.
You're the Chief Executive Officer of the INA.
My first question is, what's hiding behind the three letters, "INA"?
It seems that there's a much wider area of expertise and skill than we imagine.
What lies behind these three letters is 81 miles of shelves
of archives and memories of French TV.
Thousands of terabytes are recorded and stored at the INA.
It's the audiovisual memory of the whole of France.
In the 70s, preserving image and sound was easy
with having so few channels and radio antennae.
But today, it's another story with all the TNT channels
and FM radio stations.
It's becoming a real headache.
It's not a headache for professionals who work at the INA every day.
It's a job and a craft which France excels at.
Today, it involves around 100 channels that we record every day
and around 20 radio stations.
Not only do we archive and store all this, but we also document it,
because an image that isn't documented is a lost image.
Do you only archive serious things?
Do you archive trivial, mainstream or comic material?
What is archived?
We don't know what will make tomorrow's headlines.
So, an event that may seem trivial or without interest,
may become an overriding concern in 20 to 40 years' time.
Whoever will be elected French President in 20 years' time,
has probably already been recorded in the INA's images and collections.
Of course, he's not listed as French President.
The image of a nobody sat in the third row in a political meeting
may one day become a very famous and well-known image.
That's why sorting out the present vis-à-vis the past
is very complicated and we don't take any chances with it.
On the other hand, our duty is to organize this memory,
to make it accessible, orderly and user-friendly for everyone.
At 10:10 PM after the interval, we have Paul Misraki's La Joie de Vivre,
but first, we have Roger Pierre's and Jean-Marc Thibault's La Joie de Vivre.
Hello ladies and gentlemen.
Like every Sunday, we'll open with religious shows at 10 AM.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen,
here's the program being shown on Channel 1 tonight.
I'm here with Jacques Chancel on the top floor of the INA.
On the sixth floor. - The sixth floor of the INA.
We're going to reel off some of the highlights of TV history
that we've selected from a computer.
To jog the memory.
Zitrone is a great place to start.
I'm waiting like you.
But it doesn't seem like good news. Yes?
Yes, I've told the viewers that we're in a transition period.
But, as they're our friends, whatever the channel or company,
I'd like you to tell me what's going on.
He's a surprising character
because he seemed loudmouthed, ridiculous and temperamental.
But when you understood him intimately,
he was timid, nervous and sentimental.
There were lots of stories related to this soft side of him.
But he was a true voice and a real character.
He was made for early TV,
so much so, that he became almost a caricature.
But Zitrone will always be remembered as the voice.
Are you from Saint-Amand, sir? - That's right.
What's your name? - Jean Mackowieck.
What's your job? - I'm a miner.
What's your weight? - 159 pounds in the nude.
That's 160 with your trousers on.
And you're from Dax. What's your name? - Lapique.
FANS TAKE NOTE
What's your job? - I'm a wine merchant.
What's your weight? - Just over 220 pounds.
Way to go!
DIRECTOR: IGOR BARRÈRE
Pierre Lazareff,
Pierre Desgraupes,
Pierre Dumayet
and Igor Barrère
present
Cinq colonnes à la une.
That's the legendary magazine show of the 60s.
Yes, it's the first benchmark magazine show on TV.
First of all, two great characters.
Pierre Lazareff, who was a big media mogul.
He was head of France Soir back then.
There were Desgraupes and Dumayet, two cultural guys,
Igor Barrère, a great director.
It was terrific to see how these people worked on TV,
without any pretense, total conviction in what they were doing
and without trying to show off.
They were diehard journalists and they were tough.
We're in the early 50s, when Eurovision began
and it's the coronation of young Queen Elizabeth.
It's TV's great event.
CORONATION OF ELIZABETH II
It's the first time we show our major resources to the world.
It was spectacular.
First of all, it was practically a young girl being crowned.
She was taking office surrounded by the entire monarchy.
It was England grandstanding.
It was a huge spectacle.
The Lido or the great music halls had never put on a performance like that.
It continues in England. They still observe protocol.
It's quite dramatic and quite marvelous.
Look, on October 1, 1967, the introduction of color on French TV.
INTRODUCTION OF COLOR
43 years already. It's funny to see how uptight they are,
while the joy of color is being introduced.
Even in their jazzy suits,
they are more gray than colorful.
Why are they all wearing navy blue suits?
The weight of the world on their shoulders for an incredible moment.
Some clever clogs has placed an orange bin back right,
but it's difficult to see the color.
FOLON CREDITS
What do these images evoke for you? Folon.
For me, it's one of the most important moments in our lives
for Marcel Jullian and I.
It's the creation of Antenne 2.
It took both of us around just five weeks
to conceive a channel.
Never will we have another pleasure like that.
And then Jullian said to me: "We need a logo and credits."
So, I went to find painter, Georges Mathieu,
who had created the Antenne 2 logo.
And then, my friend, Jean-Michel Folon who I asked to create the credits.
He asked me: "What will the channel be called?"
I said: "Antenne 2."
He took all these little guys
and created what we watch today
over a soundtrack by Michel Colombier.
When the channel finished broadcasting, in the days before 24 hour TV,
some people continued watching the test card to see the end of Folon.
NATIONAL AUDIOVISUAL INSTITUTE
Look at this wall of screens.
We're here in the heart of the INA in the legal deposit.
Hi, Eric. - Hi, Eric.
You have a very nice name. - So do you!
The legal deposit was invented by King Francis I in the 16th century
and it still exists.
It still exists and it was gradually extended to photography and film
TECHNICAL MANAGER
and then to radio and TV in 1992.
What is the aim of this legal deposit?
Two major functions:
the collective memory of a broadcast cultural heritage.
TV and radio are part of this cultural heritage.
And making it available for consultation for research purposes.
Does this mean that all the TV channels that we can see here are archived?
Twenty four seven.
I'm randomly taking this disc. France 2.
What is this? One program? One day?
It's one day. 24 hours of a TV channel. To be precise, France 2.
OK.
Once you've recorded all this, do you have 100 discs per day?
Does somebody analyze them and categorize and index the programs?
We have a technical structure that does the recording, of course.
It wouldn't make sense without documentary processing.
For every 10 technicians, we have 100 archivists
indexing, cataloging and giving meaning to these recordings in the database.
Thanks a lot, Eric. - Thanks. Bye.
The legal deposit records 100 TV channels every day.
ADVERTISING SPACE
FRENCH ADVERTISING AUTHORITY
Jean-Paul Goude, hello. - Hello.
Advertising is at the INA.
Do you see that as recognition?
Because it's there now, but it wasn't the case at the beginning.
VISIBLE ON ina.fr
Yes, advertising is an inescapable phenomenon.
So, it's totally normal to have archives.
Plus, it's funny when you see the years going by and morals evolving.
It's normal.
It will allow him to grow and go further.
You're one of the first advertisers
to think of advertising as more than just business
and that a 30 or 45 second advert is also a small work of art.
That was the best case scenario for me.
I've not only made good movies, I've made some terrible ones too,
but if we take the best ones,
it was my chance to make what I called "brief films,"
as opposed to short or feature length.
Brief films. - That's right.
I didn't invent the formula, but I used it.
I like it and it totally suits me.
In the early 80s, you're just back from the US
and you're asked to make an advert for jeans, which you don't wear.
And you shift the film's script and concept.
That was the crucial time to do something different.
What did you suggest to these jean manufacturers?
A small rock opera
which I guaranteed Philippe Michel, the agency's CEO,
that all young people would love, with a killer soundtrack.
The only allusion to jeans was the stage curtain
which dropped down at the end.
It was a curtain made of blue denim with two pockets stuck on
and everyone going wild. It was cute.
It wasn't the best, but it was the first attempt.
I belong to this tradition,
which was purely French or Belgian or North European,
of imagery. I like imagery.
I was brought up with the adventures of Tintin and Bibi Fricotin,
the adventures of someone.
Ultimately, it was a kind of transference
through the medium of advertising cinema and I told the stories of my characters.
Each time it's a small number and a small showing.
In the case of Kodak, it became a saga that lasted seven years.
These little girls had a lot of adventures.
You may be one of the first
to turn to advertising proactively.
Above all, you're an artist, saying: "Oh, that's an interesting area,
"that I must invest in and preempt."
But it threw me a curve ball.
Once you have your hand in advertising, you're in it. You're an advertiser.
You can't bite the hand that feeds you. I'm not like that at all.
I've never shouted from the rooftops that advertising doesn't interest me
and that only art matters to me. No. I got stuck in.
I claimed maybe seven or eight films as my own
and the others are part of advertising history,
but I don't stake my claim to them. - Thank you, Jean-Paul Goude.
Now you're going to see a massive computer which stores...
Hello, Gérard. - Hello.
The mass storeroom can stock over half a million hours of radio and TV.
Close to 700,000 hours. - Let's go. Watch out, it's NASA.
There you go, digital fingerprint recognition.
Off we go! Come on, Gérard.
That's some computer. Tell me the number of hours again.
Around 690,000.
That's interesting because you've selected the media
used to keep TV and radio programs.
This is from the 60s. - It's two-inch tape.
It's the first professional video recorder.
The first professional video recorder and we're in the 60s.
And the latest version? - The latest version is in the robot.
ARCHIVE MANAGER
They are digital cassettes.
We'll store 90 minutes' worth of programs on there.
And on here? - Over 100 hours.
Over 100 hours of programs! - Correct.
What does this robot do?
According to demand, it will select a cassette
and place it very quickly in a drive.
It reads the requested extract and puts the cassette back in place.
Look, ladies and gents, all your TV and radio memories are here
in this space, which measures just a few meters,
and which already stores almost 700,000 hours of radio and TV
from the 50s until the present day, practically.
Do you recognize this, Gérard?
Yes, that's the precursor. It's a 16mm film reel.
It was before video existed. - Yes.
We used to have film. - We have a lot in our warehouse.
How much is stored on film?
Almost 50% of our TV programs are stored on film.
Sometimes this film has to be restored or maintained.
Let's go and see everything set up here at the INA
to conserve it and sometimes salvage it.
When you get a program to restore from film,
the first stage is telecine.
This is when you transfer the film reel
through a machine that reads the film and sends it to a video camera,
VIDEO RESTORER
transferring the film to a magnetic tape
in a professional digital Betacam format.
My job here at the INA is to restore French TV archives
so that, whether they are broadcast on TV or released on DVD,
they're in the nearest possible condition to when they were first broadcast.
Here, you can see the original image on the right hand screen
and on the left hand screen, you'll see the results
as I change the settings to remove the faults.
The main fault here is the vertical stripes.
We can treat almost any possible fault,
whether on film or video.
For example, we can remove static.
Static is caused by the video aging
where information starts to disappear.
So, when the video recorder can't read it anymore, it creates lines like this
instead.
And the equivalent of film, or the closest thing,
are grains or gelatin shards.
Grains appear when information has disappeared
or if it's hidden by dust.
We can correct that.
Restoration is still just masking the faults.
We're not magicians, alas.
We can't recreate what has gone.
According to your theory, we can show the bare naked truth on TV.
To prove it, just open your eyes and here comes the bare naked truth.
Is she really naked?
Of course, you know my expertise on the subject.
But there are places you can't see.
A PROGRAM BY JACQUES MARTIN AND BERNARD LION
Here we go, Raphaël.
Do you remember any freaky things that made you laugh as a teenager?
Yes, lots.
It's the sign of a bad interviewer when the guy answers just yes or no.
Are you OK otherwise? - Yes, great.
I'm happy to be here. - That was my next question.
Happy to be here? - Yes. I wouldn't have come otherwise.
Joking aside, why is the INA so important?
Now he's waking up.
It's not that the INA is important, it's fundamental.
Two years ago, with the agreement of the INA chairman,
I created my own TV channel, Raphaël Mezrahi INA,
at Jean-Michel Ribe's Champs-Élysée Théâtre du Rond-Point.
There were two screens, two sets of headphones
and, as soon as there were two listeners or viewers, I had a full audience.
I used that an awful lot and also, programs by Jean-Christophe Averty,
who I'm paying tribute to today. He doesn't get the credit he deserves.
He's an absolute master
and everything that exists today, couldn't exist without him.
DIRECTED BY JEAN-CHRISTOPHE AVERTY
INA 2 is here!
Amédée Lampion. That's Étienne Roblot, likewise.
Amédée Lampion, listen and watch.
Can you see OK? Tell me if I should move left or right.
My brother likes sausages
My sister likes potted meat
My aunty likes corned beef hash
My uncle doesn't like it
My mom makes omelets
For my dad, but he hates them...
Why Le Schmirschmouf? How do you find such things?
Do you come here and ask a researcher:
"Find me ridiculous things." - No, I don't ask anyone.
I'm at home and as I'm so well known, I have access to INA MEDIAPRO services.
I have a real passion
for the INA and all TV before 1980.
Because my ultimate TV dream and why I have all these documents,
I have unreleased Salvador Dali and Coluche,
I organized the INA's whole closet of Coluche material back then.
It was scattered everywhere.
I tidied it up because my first show was a Coluche special.
Not everybody knows that was my first job.
Who won the grand prix?
It has rhythm. - What's her name?
She's called Louise Petit.
Ladies and gents, right before your very eyes,
on INA 2, that is, Raphaël Mezrahi's cell phone,
Louise Petit sings À dada sur le petit cheval.
No! If you don't know it, say nothing.
This guy is a presenter and he's always getting names mixed up.
That's the thing. - Nonsense!
Carry on and you'll stay on France 3. - I was going to say that.
Only joking!
À dada le petit cheval, Louise Petit.
He has a lovely mop of hair
He's dressed in his Sunday best
And all the young horsemen
Can't help but admire him
Horsey, horsey, here we go
Horsey, horsey, here we go...
Check out Louise Petit's legwork.
Watch out, she's about to whinny.
Now that's what you call a TV performance!
Follow me.
I must tell you about INAsup.
Hello, everyone.
It's quite simply, the leading professional training hub
and leading European training hub for careers in sound and image.
There are many types of training: Two recent Master's degrees,
training students in heritage management and the culture of web-based jobs.
You can also do a professional degree here or just a foundation course.
The foundation course offers high school graduates
professional training for careers in TV,
such as being a cameraman or editor.
All that is here. 5,500 people trained here each year.
It's immense.
Hello, Hélène. - Hello.
Eric. - Pleased to meet you.
Hélène works as a web editor for ina.fr.
We really need to tell you about ina.fr.
Many people are unaware that, on this site,
you can find little bits of nostalgia, or TV sensations.
There are more than 25,000 hours. - Absolutely.
25,000 hours of archives. It's immense.
Type in my name, Hélène.
We'll watch my first TV appearances.
Chausey is one of the only Anglo-Norman islands under French jurisdiction...
Yes, ladies and gents, it's me. Does it say what year it is?
It's in 1994. - I had hair back then.
Great quality hair.
Wait, I'm follicly challenged! It's not possible.
What have I become!
Subtitles: Babel Subtitling - babelSUB.be