Back in October last year one of the Monday questions was about the first movie you saw at the cinema. I remembered the movie and the location of the cinema, but not what the name was. It was the start of journey into the history of cinemas in Rotterdam. I bought the book “Fantasy, Illusion and enchantment: Memories of cinemas in Rotterdam” by Herman Romer and found out more about the rich cinema history the city I was born and grew up in has. Henk Berg has also written a great book about the subject. In this new series I literally look into that history (using information out of their books as a source), one cinema at a time, starting with “Centraal”, which gave me my first movie going experience.
The idea behind this series is based on photos I found in the archives of the city of Rotterdam. I wanted to go to the exact spot that photo was taken, make my own and then fuse the two together to create that look into the past. It turned out to an interesting process. First of all it’s next to impossible to determine the exact spot the old photo was taken. I loaded all the pictures on my mobile phone, loaded them up and at the same time have my camera above it to see if the images were similar. That turned out to be a method which worked pretty good if it wasn’t for the second issue, not every camera is the same. Even if I took the picture in the exact same spot, the lens I used wasn’t the same as the original one, making the process of matching them up a very hard thing to do. With some distortion/zooming and perspective changes it would work for a lot of photos, but not for all. So I focussed on the ones that did match up and in the coming weeks you will see the results of it. Now onto the first one, “Centraal”, which was located on the “Oude Binnenweg”.
This is what that street looks like now. On the right you see a casino, some fake marble and then a clothing store. That’s the spot where the cinema used to be located:
An archival picture of the cinema.
The screen doesn’t seem as big as I remember.
The cinema was opened on the 22nd of October 1953 by the mayor, with a capacity of 852 seats and a screen that can display widescreen and CinemaScope pictures. It opened showing the movie Small Town Girl. As the years went by it started to struggle. Towards the end it started showing porn (this was before the internet) to get people in seats, but finally closed in March of 1989.
A look into the past shows where it used to be located:
The street has changed quite a bit:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is_hVhlN19k]
This is very cool! Makes me want to pay a visit to Rotterdam sometime!
There is an amazing amount of cinemas that have disappeared, so expect this series to continue for a couple of weeks. Rotterdam is an awesome city, especially if you are into architecture. I lived there most of my life (now live just outside it), so no surprise that I love the town š
That is cool. I love that combined old/new picture, you really get a sense of how much the street has changed. Last year in my city (Vancouver) they demolished a 104 year old theatre. Makes me sad to think about the lost history.
I’ve created these pictures for all the ones that disappeared in the center of town (still have to do a couple for some other) and will be showing those in the coming weeks.
104 year old! Wow, sad to see something like that demolished. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of cinema in my town and you just can’t imagine how different everything used to be, with orchestras playing and actual storytellers (of course this was before the second world war).
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