Cinémathèque suisse, Film archive and theater in Lausanne, Switzerland

The Cinémathèque suisse is a film archive and cinema housed in the Casino de Montbenon in Lausanne, with two projection rooms and daily screenings. Its collections are kept at the Penthaz research and archiving centre, and it also runs a documentation office in Zürich. The Capitole cinema in Lausanne, bought by the city in 2010, is part of the institution.

The Swiss Film Archives were created in Basel on 1 October 1943 with support from the Kunstmuseum Basel, but the city cut its subsidies in April 1948. The Association Cinémathèque suisse was then founded in Lausanne on 3 November 1948, with Claude Emery as first director, and the Basel collections moved there in 1949. Erich von Stroheim sponsored its official inauguration in 1950, the year the City of Lausanne granted its first subsidy. Freddy Buache led the institution from 1951 to 1996.

The archive holds materials that document how cinema has evolved as an art form and cultural practice over time. Visitors can explore posters and photographs that reveal changing tastes and styles in filmmaking across different eras.

The cinema is located in central Lausanne and easy to find, with a café and bar on site for refreshments. The spaces are set up for comfortable viewing during longer film screenings.

The Penthaz research and archiving centre, opened on 6 September 2019 at a cost of 50.6 million Swiss francs, holds the collections on three basement levels covering 5,300 square metres. The 13,000-square-metre building stores hundreds of thousands of reels and posters. Around 400 films are donated each year and 15 to 20 are restored by a staff of about 100 people.