Pathe Baby Cinema Outfit

Pathe Freres
Paris, France
ca. 1922 - 1925

the Pathe Baby movie camera is modest in appearance. I purchased it in the mid-1970s with its projector, numerous accessories, and about fifty vintage films. It’s still operable today.

The camera, itself, is a 9.5mm leather-covered, center-sprocketed movie camera that was very popular in Europe and the British Empire. The Pathe Baby projector is motor-driven, and in its day, projected movies from cassettes loaded with 8.5 meters of film. The film was caught in a glass front chamber, from which it could be re-wound manually. The films offered by Pathe were reduction prints of commercial films. A library of over 100 titles was available.

My collection of films is notable, containing boxed cassettes of short movies featuring Charles Lindbergh, Will Rogers, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Lillian Gish, Harold Lloyd, and many other celebrities of the Roaring Twenties era.