 New facade restored to the 1932 | |
 | |
| Former names | Le Rex |
|---|---|
| Location | Paris, France |
| Coordinates | 48°52′14″N2°20′52″E / 48.870550°N 2.347750°E |
| Owner | Alexandre Hellmann |
| Operator | SAS Le Grand Rex Paris |
| Type | Cinema |
| Capacity | 2,702 |
| Screens | 7 screening halls 1 concert and show venue 1 club (Rex Club) 1 Museum (Rex Studios) |
| Construction | |
| Opened | December 8, 1932 |
| Architect | Auguste Bluysen, John Eberson |
| Website | |
| www | |
Le Grand Rex is a cinema and concert venue in Paris, France.
It is located at No. 1, boulevard Poissonnière in the 2nd arrondissement, on the grands boulevards.
Its facades and roofs, as well as its hall and its decor, have been listed as a Monument historique since a decree on October 5, 1981. [1] This giant cinema has a capacity of more than 2,700 people in its great hall and posts an average attendance level of 1 million visitors per year. [2] [3]
Le Grand Rex is served by the Metro lines 8 and 9 at the Bonne-Nouvelle station, as well as by bus lines 20, 32, and 39.
In the early 1930s, Jacques Haïk, a wealthy movie producer, distributor and owner of the Olympia, got the idea of building a very extravagant cinema: which could have a capacity of more than 5000 spectators on a surface area of 2,000 m², with a ceiling peaking at more than 30 meters, representing a luminous starry vault.
Its designers are the architect Auguste Bluysen and the engineer John Eberson. The façade was designed by the sculptor Henri-Édouard Navarre and the decoration of the great hall was by Maurice Dufrêne.
The Grand Rex is a scale model of the famous Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
The cinema is also known for its interior décor. Specialized in "atmospheric halls", its architects built more than 400 decors of phantasmatic cities under cloudy, clear or starry skies in the United States.
Here, the great hall has been decorated by an "ancient Mediterranean" city in relief, located in the open air with its colorful walls reproducing the Art Deco atmosphere of the "French Riviera" villas.
All of the architect's desires were fulfilled, except for the number of seats, which originally had to be reduced to 3,300. [2]
The Grand Rex hall opens its doors on the evening of December 8, 1932, in the presence of the cinema's pioneer, Louis Lumière and 3,300 guests. The Three Musketeers by Henri Diamant-Berger is on the bill. [2]
It is one of the biggest halls in Paris.
The projection booth is located in the corbel of the rue Poissonnière. The angle lantern is actually a simple metal trellis on which was projected cement mortar.
The producer and director Émile Couzinet opened a small Rex in Bordeaux (800 seats), designed by the same architects, which stayed open until the 1970s. [2]
Despite the success of the Grand Rex, Jacques Haïk files for bankruptcy and sells it to Gaumont, before Jean Hellmann, Alan Byre and Laudy Lawrence buy it themselves. [2]
During the Occupation, the Grand Rex was requisitioned by the German army, which turned it into a Soldatenkino, saving it for its troops of soldiers on leave. In September 1942, it was the target of a bombing by the Détachement Valmy. [4] The cinema reopened on October 13, 1944, after the Liberation of Paris. It showed an American film, with chewing gums available during the intermission. From April 12 to June 22, 1945, it temporarily closed and turned into a welcome center for the repatriated war prisoners. In 1946, Pinocchio became the first Disney feature film to be shown there. [2]
At that time, the program of Grand Rex was divided into two parts, with an intermission in between: a first part with a musical opening and the news, a second part with attractions (waterfalls, erupting volcanos…) and then the proper film. Dancers, musicians, machinery and ushers were therefore necessary for the smooth running of the show. [2]
Starting on December 4, 1953, the first feature film in CinemaScope, The Robe , directed by Henry Koster, was projected there in tandem with the Normandie cinema located on the Champs-Elysées. [5] In 1950 already, during the screening of Gone with the Wind , the projectionist had enlarged the image during fire scenes. [2]
After the failure of the "Le Miroir de Neptune" (The Neptune Mirror) attraction in 1953 (swimmers performing in a transparent pool placed on the stage), the "Féerie des eaux" (Magic waters) attraction was created in March 1954, during which 3,000 liters are projected twenty meters high with lighting effects and a musical accompaniment. It is a success: water shows have enlivened the great hall every year at Christmas since 1954, the "Féerie des eaux" (Magic waters), shortly before the screening of the end-of-the-year Disney film.
In 1957, the escalator of the Grand Rex was inaugurated by Gary Cooper and Mylène Demongeot, superseding elevators. [2] It was the first time a European hall was equipped with such material.
In 1960, the cinema experienced a better attendance level than the Louvre Museum. Eight years later, the combination of the "Féerie des eaux" (Magic waters) and The Jungle Book enabled the Grand Rex to receive around 500,000 spectators. [2]
In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock presented his new movie, The Birds there.
In 1974, three small halls were added to the complex, at the location of the dressing and rehearsal rooms. The Rex Club, a disco club, replaces the "Rêve" dancing, a chic establishment which was created in 1932. [2]
In 1984, the Grand Rex included seven halls, then eight in 1990, but without having needed to divide the great hall, going against a trend noticeable in other cinemas. The Grand Rex and its Art Deco facade are listed in the inventory of the Monument Historique in 1981. [2]
In 1988, "Le Grand Large" (The Great Large) was installed, a 300 square meters screen, making it the biggest (non-IMAX) screen in Europe. [6] Designed and created by Luc Heripret, it was inaugurated by Luc Besson’s The Big Blue , which totalled 700,000 tickets sold at the Grand Rex after months on the bill. [2]
In 1997, the Grand Rex opened its program to festivals, concerts and solo performances of many artists who perform on stage.
In 1988, the director Peter Jackson received an award for his film Bad Taste there, and, in 2002, the singer Britney Spears was present for the screening of Crossroads, causing a riot, during which some outside windows were shattered. [2]
In 2009, the façade was equipped with digital signs, whose light showcases its Art Deco column. [2]
In 2017, the great hall was renovated. [7]
In 2020, from February 22 to March 8, the singer Madonna played her last eight shows of her Madame X Tour.
While its contemporary attendance levels are usually close to a million spectators, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Grand Rex to close in August 2020, after attempting at the end of the first lockdown in June, to screen retrospectives and thematic marathons. [8] Starting from December of the same year, the cinema is being fully renovated. [9]
The Grand Rex now has a capacity ranging from 2,700 to 2,800 spectators in its great hall.
It is renowned for hosting premieres with the films’ crews [2] as well as special events, called “Marathons”, which gather the fans of a franchise (i.e. Star Wars , the Marvel Cinematic Universe , various adaptations of Tolkien’s work, The Hunger Games ).
In 2023, the film Oppenheimer premiered at the Grand Rex.
This screen, one of the biggest in France and which takes up the entire available width of the hall, is hidden in the cinema’s ceiling and only comes out for screenings. While it is uncoiled in the dark, the spectators can discover an original presentation in 2D or 3D.
The audience is only seated on the 2nd balcony and ends up particularly close to the screen.
Projection: 2 Barco DP32 projectors in 4k. [10]
Since 2017, the Grand Rex has renovated its halls every year. We can find:
A 50-minute course is available behind the big screen, backstage and in the technical spaces of the cinema. Initiated by Francois Confino and Philippe Hellmann, it was designed and created by Luc Heripret, in collaboration with the set designer Pascal Mazoyer. The course presents the history of the Grand Rex before diving into the world of the cinema's occupations and special effects in an interactive and playful way: pedestrian and filmed course. The visitor gradually becomes the extra of a shooting before being projected in a film extract, whose recording they will be able to buy.
In 2021, the Grand Rex offers its clients a new attraction which immerses the spectators in riddles to help save the greatest cinema classics. This escape game, which progresses through different rooms representing the main themes of the 7th art, forces the clients to focus on collecting a maximum of points.
It was designed and created by Luc Heripret and Team Break within the Rex Studios.
Each year, the Christmas Disney cartoon is traditionally screened in the Grand Rex great hall (screen under the arc).
The screening starts two weeks before the French national release.
As the opening act, the audience can attend a sound, light and water show called the Féerie des eaux (Magic waters). A huge pool and 1,200 colored water jets are placed on the stage for this.
The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
A movie theater or cinema ,also known as a movie house, cinema hall, picture house, picture theater or simply theater, is a business that contains auditoriums for viewing films for public entertainment. Most are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing tickets.
The Olympia is a concert venue in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, France, located at 28 Boulevard des Capucines, equally distancing Madeleine church and Opéra Garnier, 300 metres (980 ft) north of Vendôme square. Its closest métro/RER stations are Madeleine, Opéra, Havre–Caumartin, and Auber.
Anna Karina was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, model, and singer. She was an early collaborator of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, her first husband, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), My Life to Live (1962), Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou (1965), and Alphaville (1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.
A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 French science-fiction adventure trick film written, directed and produced by Georges Méliès. Inspired by Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites, and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. Méliès leads an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers as the main character Professor Barbenfouillis.
The Cinémathèque française, founded in 1936, is a French non-profit film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris's 12th arrondissement, the archive offers daily screenings of films from around the world. It is the second oldest cinematheque in France, after the one in Saint-Étienne, which was founded in 1922.
The Rex is a cinema in the town of Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. Designed in the art deco style by David Evelyn Nye in 1936, the cinema opened to the public in 1938. After 50 years of service, the cinema closed in 1988 and became derelict. The building was listed Grade II by English Heritage, and following a campaign to save the Rex by a local entrepreneur, the cinema re-opened to the public in 2004.
Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a French filmmaker and magician generally regarded as the first person to recognize the potential of narrative film. He made about 520 films between 1896 and 1912, covering a range of genres including trick films, fantasies, comedies, advertisements, satires, costume dramas, literary adaptations, erotic films, melodramas, and imaginary voyages. His works are often considered as important precursors to modern narrative cinema, though some recent scholars have argued that Méliès's films are better understood as spectacular theatrical creations rooted in the 19th-century féerie tradition.
The Kingdom of the Fairies, initially released in the United States as Fairyland, or the Kingdom of the Fairies and in Great Britain as The Wonders of the Deep, or Kingdom of the Fairies, is a 1903 French silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès.
Le Salon Indien du Grand Café was a room in the basement of the Grand Café, on the Boulevard des Capucines near the Place de l'Opéra in the center of Paris. It is notable for being the place that hosted the first commercial public film screening by the Lumière brothers, on December 28, 1895. The ten short films on the program, were:
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French magician, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of cinema, primarily in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Méliès rose to prominence creating "trick films" and became well known for his innovative use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards in his work. His most important films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).
The culture of Paris concerns the arts, music, museums, festivals and other entertainment in Paris, the capital city of France. The city is today one of the world's leading business and cultural centers; entertainment, music, media, fashion, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities.
Cinderella is an 1899 French trick film directed by Georges Méliès, based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 219–224 in its catalogues, where it is advertised as a grande féerie extraordinaire en 20 tableaux.
Veronica is a 1972 Romanian children's musical film directed by Elisabeta Bostan. It was selected as the Romanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 46th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. It is the first of two films based on La Fontaine's Fables. It established Bostan's reputation as a director in the genre of children's film.
The Lycée Edgar-Poe is a private secondary school located in Paris, 2, rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, in the 10th arrondissement, very close to Le Grand Rex. It is named after the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). This school is far from the rue Edgar-Poe.
The Merry Frolics of Satan is a 1906 French silent trick film by Georges Méliès. The film is an updated comedic adaptation of the Faust legend, borrowing elements from two stage féerie spectaculars: Les Pilules du diable (1839), a classic stage fantasy with knockabout comedy, and Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable (1905), a satirical update of Les Pilules du diable to which Méliès had contributed two sequences, one of which he incorporated into the present film.
Féerie, sometimes translated as "fairy play", was a French theatrical genre known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians, to tell stories with clearly defined melodrama-like morality and an extensive use of supernatural elements. The genre developed in the early 19th century and became immensely popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the development of burlesque, musical comedy and film.
The Cité du Cinéma or Studios of Paris is a film studio complex originally supported and founded by the film director and producer Luc Besson, located in Saint-Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris, in a renovated power plant, commissioned in 1933 to power the Parisian metro. The studio complex is intended to be a competitor of Cinecittà in Rome, Pinewood in London and Babelsberg in Berlin. It was inaugurated on 21 September 2012. In February 2022 Tunisian-French film producer Tarak Ben Ammar finalized a deal to purchase Studios de Paris.
The Christmas Dream is a 1900 French silent Christmas-themed trick film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 298–305 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a féerie cinématographique à grand spectacle en 20 tableaux.
The Witch is a 1906 French short silent film by Georges Méliès. The film is named for a witch, Carabosse, who tells a poor troubadour that he is destined to rescue a damsel in distress, but demands a high price for a magic charm to help the troubadour in his quest. When the troubadour cheats the witch to obtain the magic charm, she sets out in pursuit of him, and puts various obstacles in his way before finally being vanquished by forces of good.
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