Being able to watch a film at home – now perhaps the most common way to see them – was a dream of the earliest film pioneers, dating back to the 1890s. But it didn’t begin to become a widespread reality until 1922, with the introduction of a now little-known format: 9.5mm film.
Invented by Pathé as a more affordable follow-up to their cumbersome and expensive 28mm, 9.5mm was released into the home-movie market the year before 16mm (and 10 years before 8mm), with the Pathé Baby projector. Primarily a home-viewing format, it was soon favoured for home-movie and amateur filmmaking and became the first popular, widely-used home-movie film gauge…