One hot afternoon in July 2010, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón sensed that the Rex cinema was going to close. “I went to buy the tickets and the ticket agent told me: 'If you enter it is at your own risk. The air conditioning does not work'. We were four cats who dared to watch the movie and, as expected, we burned alive,” the writer recalls.
The Rex cinema on Gran Via closed on July 31 as Martínez de Pisón had suspected. Almost 14 years later it remains boarded up. It's not usual. In recent decades, many cinemas in Barcelona have disappeared, devoured by real estate ambition, video stores and, later, the rise of digital platforms. They have become fashion stores, restaurants, some exclusive, others neighborhood, or supermarkets.
The Comedia, located on the coveted corner of Paseo de Gràcia and Gran Via, has been the last to close its doors. He announced it on Tuesday. Comedia is another theater on the list of cinemas that have disappeared in Barcelona that, however, will always remain in the memory of moviegoers.
Like Martínez de Pisón, who arrived in Barcelona from Zaragoza in 1982, and was lucky enough to end up in front of the Urgel cinema, “which was the largest in the entire city with 1,832 seats.” The author also frequented the Waldorf, on Calabria Street, near Mistral Avenue, and the Doré, formerly Dorado, on Gran Via, which survived 82 years, but “now has been converted into an apartment block.”
Filmmaker Albert Solé's professional education began when he was a child, although he did not know it. It was forged in “the re-release theaters where you went whenever you wanted, although you would catch the film halfway through, because they projected it in a continuous session and you could spend the afternoon.” The Spring, at the confluence of Bonanova and Anglí, was one of the director's favorites, because "inside you could do whatever you wanted, smoke, eat pipes."
Solé also liked the Bretón, which was one of the most popular venues in Sarrià, and now “it has become a dance school. Those cinemas in which children of the 1950s and 1960s watched adventure, pirate or western films “were transformed into theaters for moviegoers during the Transition.”
“I spent the afternoons of my adolescence in those cinemas that began to show everything that Francoism had censored. There I discovered Stanley Kubrick or Antonioni,” explains the director, who is clearly nostalgic for those places of freedom “where you could smoke and the battery only caught your attention sometimes when you lit up a joint.”
The journalist Lluís Permanyer is an expert in Barcelona urban geography. He knows the city like no one else and is also a film lover: “My first job was as a film critic.” His love for the seventh art was born on the Sundays of his childhood, because “we always went to football and then to watch a movie.”
“Thursday afternoons were my favorite time when I was a child, there was no school and the lady who worked at home took me to the Publi and the Savoy, which were the first-run cinemas. When I was able to go alone, I regularly went to the Marilén, in Plaza Urquinaona; to the Capitol, on La Rambla, and to the Atlántida, which was on Trafalgar Street,” she recalls.
The Atlántida was part of a chain whose businessman always baptized his rooms with names that began with the letter A, Astoria, Alcázar, Aristos... “it was an advertising strategy, because like that on the newspaper billboards, which are in alphabetical order , their cinemas came out first.”
Contxita Casanovas was not stung by the clever businessman's maneuver: “I went to the Bosque cinema, which was the one close to my house,” says the director of the BCN Film Fest and person in charge of the Va de cine program on Ràdio 4. “There I saw the Walt Disney movies and I was excited about Bambi, Dumbo or The Aristocats. I remember it as if it were yesterday,” explains Casanovas, whose voice is now a reference for all film buffs in Spain.
“I have been lucky because the cinemas of my life are still alive, like the Bosque or the Verdi,” says Casanovas, but as he remembers, many theaters that he frequented come to mind and that have joined that long list of disappeared cinemas. Like the Diagonal or the Casablanca, which showed films in their original version.
Or the Alexandra, on Rambla de Catalunya, which “had a wonderful lobby from where we once did the program.” Or the Club Coliseum, also on Rambla de Catalunya, which “was the one that showed Woody Allen films.” Or the morning shows at the Waldorf, where “my grandmother took me and where I saw Ben-Hur, which had a great impact on me because of the theme of lepers.” Or the Capsa, the Novedades, the Tívoli... “I also miss the Renoir Les Corts.”
And the list is very extensive. The Astoria, on Paris Street which is now a dinner and show venue; the Paris of Portal de l'Àngel, which became a Zara; the Princesa, on Via Laietana which now houses some offices of the Generalitat; the Icaria, the Arenas, the Arcadia, the Aquitania, the Fémina, the Méliès...
Many cinemas have disappeared, but Barcelona has not lost its fans. In recent years, other establishments have opened, larger and more modern multiplexes such as the Cinesa Diagonal and the Diagonal Mar, the Gran Sarrià, the Balmes Multicine or the Phenomena Experience, which attracts lovers of the seventh art, young and old alike. , with a program that intersperses premieres and masterpieces of all time.
In addition, since 2017, Barcelona has had its own film festival, the BCN Film Fest, which in these seven years has established itself as a platform to see good films in advance. And big screen cinema will hardly die, “because it is a great experience,” Casanovas concludes.
