The Cinémathèque Française

Film lovers’ senses will whir like old-school projectors as soon as they step inside this museum and archive, with one of the largest collections of film in the world.

As with seemingly everywhere in Paris, it has its own dramatic history stemming from the 1930s, when a collector named Henri Langlois almost lost his substantial collection to the Nazis.

In occupied France, German authorities ordered that all films made prior to 1937 be destroyed. A defiant Langlois co-ordinated an operation to smuggle them out. After his return in peacetime, the French government gave him a small screening room, a subsidy and some staff and the Cinémathèque was born.

Stepping inside the museum now is like handing over your tickets to a surreal cinema. Screens suspended from the low ceilings loop footage from the first — and weirdest — days of film, while display cases trace the developing tech of moving pictures.

There are vintage movie posters, scripts, notes and drawings — even a self-portrait by Charlie Chaplin — while the iconic prop collection includes items such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s cloak and the robot from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, the first scifi film.

The museum also makes an interesting representation on how the early innovators echo in the works of today’s masters. Tim Burton, for instance, clearly drew on the 1920 silent horror Das

kabinett Des Dr Caligari for his Edward Scissorhands; while Lang’s robot is an obvious precursor to George Lucas’s C-3PO.

There are almost daily screenings here too of films from their archives. It’s all thoroughly absorbing and worth a few hours at least. See cinematheque.fr