Documentaries

Sygma News

1977-1989 : the Press agency in the 1980s  
1,500 hours - Pathé collection

Sygma TV was founded in the 1970s by photographers who had dreamed of developing a press agency for moving images. The collection includes over 2,000 items from the People series and several hundred news stories.

The agency started with a number of commissioned films, in addition to producing some exclusive reports on its own initiative: Brigitte Bardot et les Bébés Phoques (baby seals) by Hubert Henrotte in 1977, Fugain au Havre by Michel Parbot in the same year, and a biography, Bernardo Bertolucci, by Bernand Moskowicz in 1982 .

In 1983, Sygma TV enjoyed an unprecedented exclusive: Michel Parbot – a journalist with Sygma and the prototype of the “embedded” correspondent – arrived on the island of Grenada two days before American forces landed. The latter then forbade all journalists from entering the island during the first three days of military action; consequently, Parbot was the sole journalist to capture events on film .

This first international scoop led to many hundreds more. The collection provides an outstanding account of the 1980s through reports on Lebanon, Afghanistan and Colonel Massoud, biographies on François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Jean-Marie Le Pen and even the Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa, and footage of the historic collapse of the Berlin Wall .

GP archives has preserved and marketed the thousands of cassettes and rushes that make up this extensive collection .