In 1922, cinema entered the home, thanks to the production of a small, easy-to-master projector and a film format created especially for it: 9.5mm film. Under the slogan “cinema at home” (“cinéma chez soi”), the Pathé-Baby marked the arrival of cinematographic entertainment in the living room. It was possible, with just a few simple steps and no previous knowledge of the process, to project and watch short films, shown exclusively in cinemas only a few years previously. Popular for its ease of handling, and moderate pricing compared to the 16mm format released a year later, 9.5mm film was widely considered to be the middle-ground format for over 60 years – it offered image quality roughly equivalent to that of 16mm, at a cost only slightly higher than that of 8mm.

Distributed worldwide, and offering a catalog of more than 6,000 titles, 9.5mm achieved Charles Pathé’s long-held vision of developing the “home cinema” market. The Pathé executive saw this as a way to expand his factories’ business by creating new outlets for film sales, while at the same time allowing him to repurpose his catalog of negatives. After the experience of 28mm Pathé KOK – a format that remained stubbornly expensive to produce – Charles Pathé’s team of engineers (including Jacques Marette, Pathé’s technical director; along with Pierre-Victor Continsouza and Charles Dupuis, camera manufacturer and consultant engineer respectively) established the specifications for the new 9.5mm format, with an emphasis on keeping production costs to a minimum. Film and camera were designed closely together. As a result, the Pathé-Baby projector and 9.5mm film were inseparable for more than a decade. Copies could only be projected in the Pathé-Baby projector, as their production method was protected by patents. 

Following Dupuis’ advice, the dimensions of the 9.5mm images were based on those considered for a plate camera-projector designed by Gianni Bettini (Bettini filed a patent for this plate device on November 9, 1910; towards the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, magazine articles appeared, describing the device and its operation, with supporting drawings, and announced its imminent commercialization (Mareschal, 1912, 1913)). A 9mm by 6mm frame, reduced to the right ratio, gave an image measuring 8.5mm x 6.4mm, a film surface area large enough to allow a 1m-wide projection lit by a 6W bulb. Most importantly, the placement of the perforations in the middle of the film, between each frame, optimized the scale of the surface area available for the images. Already employed on earlier formats – such as Wrench and Darling’s Biokam, or Gaumont’s Chrono de poche – this central perforation row became the trademark of 9.5mm. The printed image almost filled the width of the film, to within a few tenths of a millimeter, thus making it possible to print three copies simultaneously on a single 35mm strip – a width already used by factory equipment – before being slit into individual 9.5mm prints.

To keep retail prices down, Pathé-Baby films were produced as re-edited and shortened versions of the original titles. Originally, these adaptations would not exceed 10m or 20m of film, as they were packaged in patented reel magazines that only the Pathé-Baby projector could handle. Another distinctive feature of Pathé-Baby films was the presence of side notches. These triggered an automatic stop of the film on non-moving images (such as intertitles) for a few seconds during projection. This idea, suggested by Ferdinand Zecca, saved additional film length – ingeniously extending projection times.

Beginning with 194 titles in the first catalog of October 1922, the Pathé-Baby film library quickly grew to include several thousand titles (as unearthed by the extensive work of the film historians and collectors Patrick Moules, Garth Pedler and David Wyatt), and offered a wide range of themes: fiction, shorts, features, educational documentaries and newsreels. The Pathé-Baby format secured worldwide distribution through franchise arrangements set up in many countries. Films were printed with title cards in several languages, sometimes in bilingual versions such as French/Arabic or English/Japanese.

Most films were manufactured by Pathé at its Joinville-le-Pont factory, or by Pathéscope at its laboratory in Cricklewood, North London, for anglophone markets. In response to the standardization of projection practices and the development of projectors equipped with more powerful (hot!) bulbs, Pathé gradually abandoned the use of notch stops, starting in 1935. After the Second World War, this feature disappeared completely. Similarly, the famous patented reel magazine gave way to longer films on reels of 30m, 60m, 110m and more. When the patent license expired, other manufacturers began producing 9.5mm films. Pathé stopped production around 1960, and Film Office – a producer and distributor of films in substandard formats (8, 9.5 and 16 mm) in France, founded in the late 1940s – took over until 1970. In England, Novascope 9.5 Films, a private company, continued to produce a few titles until 1975.