The Movies, Amsterdam - front / angle
The building on Haarlemmerdijk 161 has quite a history as a cinema.
The cinema opened on October 11th, 1912 as the "Tavenu", one
screen with 240 seats. It closed only two years later. It reopened a
year later as the "Cinema Hollandia", and slowly demised. In
1952 it was restored and renovated and mainly becomes a 'second run'
theatre for it's local 40+ year audience. In the Sixties there's again
a demise and it closes in 1969.
The now lovely Tuschinski-esque art deco interior is not original but
actually put in place after a renovation in the Seventies, initiated
by Pieter Goedings, a true art film-loving projectionist at De
Uitkijk. He bought the Hollandia which by then was a sad little
pornhouse and turned it into the beautiful cozy art cinema that it is
today.
A second auditorium was added in '74, a thrird one in '80, a fourth
one in 1992. Next door is Restaurant "The Movies Wild
Kitchen". The marquee was added in the Nineties - the only one
with classic running lightbulbs in Amsterdam I know of.
The Movies still is one of the last neighbourhood cinemas of
Amsterdam, catering to it's own specific audience, with mainly first
and second run art house films and matinees for kids, on 4 screens.
One of my personal favorites.
It recently named itself "At The Movies", presumably to be
at the top of the Amsterdam cinema listings in newspapers and such. www.themovies.nl
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