In brief : A home for cinema/ « The Littré » on CD-ROM...
Cinema now has its own home. By the year 2000, the French cinémathèque - currently housed at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris - and the film library (BIFI) - based on 3,000 sq.m. near La Bastille - will have moved to the premises formerly occupied by the American Center, erected in 1994 by Franck Gehry - the Canadian-Californian architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao -, which have been left vacant since 1996. In the 12th arrondissement, in the east of Paris, the future Maison du cinéma will be at the heart of a site that is in full expansion: the Parc omnisport at Paris Bercy is nearby, the Bibliothèque nationale is opposite, not to mention the new Bercy UGC multiplex cinema, scheduled to open at the end of 1998.
On the 10,500 sq.m. of this avant-garde
A language’s past instantly channels the mind towards its future. » Prophetic words indeed by Emile Littré, since his dictionary, the most prestigious dictionary of the French language, has just embraced the world of multimedia. The four volumes of the 1872 edition and the 1876 supplement are now available on CD-ROM. It is a genuine achievement - pulled off by a small publishing company based in the south of France - given that it involved retyping the entire text as it was impossible to scan the particularly fragile original edition.
Le Littré, published by Redon, Marsanne, 1998, FF 395.00 ($ 66.-).
As the world’s thirteenth largest advertising group and France’s second largest group, Publicis has just tripled its size in the United States. In spring 1998, the French group bought up the American agency Hal Riney & Partners, killing two birds with one stone: achieving 20% of its gross margin in the United States and providing its current and future customers with an agency with a global structure.
1958-1998: Harmonia Mundi is celebrating its 40th anniversary, forty years of quality recordings by artists of great talent. It all began with the original venture of one man, Bernard Coutaz, who had the idea of establishing a publishing company for classical records. With the often voluntary support of friends and amateurs of classical music, he first chose to record organ music, performed on some of Europe’s most historical organs, a project to which he dedicated an initial catalogue. Later came the decisive encounter with the brilliant British singer Alfred Deller, who contributed to the rediscovery of English Renaissance music. Harmonia Mundi was to become one of the spearheads in the great wave of renewed interest in Baroque music.
Few discoverers have made such inspired
Based in Arles in the Provence, the Group is one of only a handful to have remained totally independent. Today, it consists of a number of subsidiaries that record and distribute the company’s discography from Paris, London, Brussels, The Hague, Heidelberg, Los Angeles, Barcelona and Moscow. At its peak and with a new venture in book publishing, Harmonia Mundi employs 250 people and turns over FF 280 m ($ 46.6 m): a fine success indeed!
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