Pathé, Charles (păthā`, Fr. shärl pätā`), 1873–1957, French photographer. He was the first to present (c.1909) the newsreel as a regular attraction at a theater in Paris. In 1910 he introduced the newsreel to the United States; thereafter the Pathé News Reel became an international product.

Pathé, Charles

(born Dec. 25, 1863, Paris, France—died Dec. 26, 1957, Monte-Carlo, Mon.) French film executive. In 1896 he and his brother Émile founded Pathé Frères, which distributed Thomas Alva Edison's Kinetoscope viewing device to French theatres. The firm entered film production using the camera developed by the Lumière brothers. Pathé Frères filmed numerous short subjects, the majority of which are sensational criminal adventures, melodramatic love stories, and comic anecdotes. In 1909 Pathé produced his first “long film,” Les Misérables, a four-reel screen version of the novel by Victor Hugo, and launched the Pathé Gazette, an internationally popular newsreel that ran until 1956. In 1914 Pathé Frères released the first episodes of The Perils of Pauline, one of the earliest screen serials. With facilities throughout the world, Pathé Frères dominated the film market in the early 20th century, and it remained a film distributor after Charles's retirement in 1929.