This study compares two sets of short silent newsreel films made in 1925, drawn from different production contexts. The one set is Gaumont Actualités, a show created by Louis Gaumont in 1910, and is the product of a relatively standardized competitive and commercial activity aimed at the cinema’s broad audience. The other is a private collection, Les Archives de la planète, funded by banker Albert Kahn between 1912 and 1931, which was compiled for knowledge purposes and, from the outset, was intended to be archived. The analysis is based on the study of about 700 films and some accounting archives. It describes the inevitable similarities between the two corpuses, as well as what constituted deviations from the standard commercial methods of the time.