The Lumière cinema is about to become a gym. The legendary hall, which began its journey on December 15, 1973 after the blessing of a canon from the Cathedral of Huesca, will end up demolished. Some investors dedicated to the field of sports have acquired it to transform it into a CrossFit center, in line with what happened with other former celluloid temples, today converted into bank branches, bingo halls and clothing stores. But the Lumière is not just another center: it was one of the legendary film installations that during the seventies delighted thousands of spectators eager to see the latest developments on screen.
After almost twenty years in a state of abandonment, this long-awaited room, located on Avenida Sant Ferran in Palma, has been coveted by several companies interested in taking advantage of its privileged location. The property’s sale announcement still appears on Internet real estate portals – although it has already been transferred, as confirmed to elDiario.es by its previous owner -: 900,000 euros for the premises which, as the publication states, was one day an “old room cinema” and which consists of an “open space with great height ideal for large shops, supermarkets, gyms, etc.” In the surrounding area, apartments offered for between 220,000 and 620,000 euros in one of the neighborhoods most affected by the serious process of gentrification that the outskirts of the Balearic capital are going through.
Since it closed its doors in 2005, the façade, along with its enormous sign, remains intact, much to the nostalgia of many of the passers-by who pass by. Others barely notice their presence. Those historic walls tell you nothing about what this 1,265-square-meter building once housed: a new giant screen 11 meters long and 5.5 meters high and more than 500 anatomical seats that had nothing to do with traditional style seats. retro that had graced cinemas in previous decades. “It is a shame that the essence of these cinemas is lost. The Lumière helped create a neighborhood,” Nacho Salas, architect and member of one of the main families that own movie theaters in Mallorca, tells this medium.
Since then, degradation has been consuming this historic building, whose seats and most characteristic elements, such as the decoration – the work of the now-defunct Galerías Preciados – that its former owner so painstakingly provided, have been disappearing from its interior. Nor is there a trace left of the posters that one day crowned the room. Not in vain, it is precisely these pieces that have currently become a coveted object of desire for collectors and second-hand sellers.
The splendor of Lumière cinema
Today, hardly anything remains of all that. Decadence has fallen on a theater that, at the hands of Antonio Servera Mestre, was inaugurated in style in 1973 and whose name paid tribute to the official inventors of cinema. ‘Official’ because, on December 28, 1895, the cinematograph – that wooden box with a lens and a perforated 35 mm film – was presented to the public for the first time by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière at the Salon Indien del Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Five years earlier, however, Louis le Prince, who in 1888 had filmed The Roundhay Garden Sceneconsidered the first film in the history of the seventh art. And all this in the midst of the fierce patent war that, due to the monopolizing desires of Thomas Edison, marked the beginnings of the film industry.
Palma was the city that in 1975 hosted the highest number of premiere theaters and neighborhood cinemas per inhabitant in Spain. Years before the opening of the Lumière, the Rivoli cinema had started, one of the few theaters that remains standing today. As Joan Villafàfila and Pako Navarro explain in the book Palma Grindhouse (2024, Nova Editorial Moll), a compendium of the history of the movie theaters that once flooded the streets of Palma and which joins other ambitious works such as Cinema in the Balearic Islands since 1896 (2001, Documenta balear), by Cristòfol-Miquel Sbert, Servera Mestre wanted to repeat the move that had brought him so much success at the Rívoli, also his property: moving the exhibition venues from the city center to the outskirts in search of those spectators who did not travel frequently to go to a premiere theater.
Blessed by the canon of the Cathedral of Huesca
“The idea they had was to bring first-run movies to the outskirts. Because then, in the neighborhoods of Palma, what there were were re-release and rerun theaters, but the premiere theaters were concentrated in the center of the city and, if someone wanted to see something new, they had to go there no matter what,” he says. Villafàfila in statements to elDiario.es. The ‘decentralization’ of these rooms allowed the Metropolitan, the Rívoli and the Lumière to see the light. For its inauguration, in addition to having the canon, the owner of the Lumière held a charity gala – and a high-profile one – sponsored by Julia Molina de Herrera, wife of the then captain general of the Balearic Military Region. A warm Decemberby Sidney Poitier, was the film that starred in the theater’s first premiere.
The truth is that the owner of the Lumière was completely right with his proposal and the place became one of the reference venues in Palma. “Their policy was above all the re-release of films that had been very successful at the time,” recalls Villafàfila. Among its screenings, films like Spartacusby Stanley Kubrick, or greaseby Randal Kleiser, which attracted large numbers of spectators to the theaters. The poster announcing the re-release of the film starring the brilliant John Travolta and Olivia Newton John read ‘Love, joy, youth, music… and a lot of going!!!’.
It was also the time when mainstream cinema classified in Spain as ‘S’ came onto the scene. As the author says, unlike the Rívoli or the Metropolitan, which did not show films of this genre, the Lumière decided to bet on them. “It was a type of cinema that left a lot of money at the box office and the company had no problem showing it,” says the researcher. The Spanish fantaterror, with its viscera and cults of Satanism, also had its space in the Lumière with The sexual rites of the devil and The invasion of the atomic zombieswhich were advertised as ‘the greatest spectacle of eroticism… and terror: sex, depravity and aberrations in a film that seems to have been made by the devil’. Already in 1993, the long-awaited premiere of jurassic parkby Steven Spielberg, caused the tickets to be sold out immediately and many spectators to stay at the doors of the theater.
They were times of cinematographic splendor in Spain – in 1965, up to 8,193 cinemas were in operation, the highest number recorded in its history and one of the largest in Europe. The projections even extended to cafes, theaters, bullrings and dance halls, parish halls and mining towns. And in Palma it was no less. In the seventies, as Navarro and Villafàfila point out, the Franco regime, “desiring to preserve at all costs the source of income that the incessant flow of tourists represented,” wanted to project an image of normality, especially externally, and achieve this The objective was to moderate the censorship prevailing during the dictatorship, which years ago had prohibited the exhibition of a multitude of cinematographic works.
Multiplex cinemas and the emergence of VHS
Currently, only the Rívoli and another of the great survivors of that era, the central Augusta hall, on the avenues of Palma, remain standing in the Balearic capital. The facilities began operating at the end of the 1940s in the same space that, just a decade before, had housed one of the darkest and most tragic prisons of Franco’s repression in Mallorca, the Can Mir prison, which was entered through the same access that thousands of moviegoers go through every year.
The arrival of multiplex cinemas, the emergence of VHS and the furor of video stores, which became the new refuge for celluloid lovers in the eighties, forced the Lumière and numerous other theaters to introduce all kinds of reforms and technological innovations to be able to survive. Others, unable to compete with large facilities, were finally forced to lower their blinds. The Lumière, after several decades of its heyday, ended up closing its doors in 2005. Villafàfila remembers it like this: “Starting in 2000, attendance at the venues plummeted and in these large venues the emptiness was much more noticeable than in neighborhood cinemas or in smaller rooms. The sessions did not exceed 10% of the room. We are talking about 50, 60 or 70 seats occupied and practically the entire room empty.”
The Lumière, in the catalog of cinemas with the greatest heritage value
The Cultural Heritage Institute of Spain included the Lumière cinema, in fact, in its initial catalog of cinemas with the greatest heritage value, with which it seeks to recognize and vindicate the legacy of these spaces as an industrial, social and cultural activity closely associated with history. and to heritage. “Although the late appreciation and protection of 20th century architecture has left many localities exposed to the interests of real estate speculation, for the State as a whole, progress has been made in recent decades in the protection of cinematographic buildings that survived the closures and demolitions that began from the sixties to the seventies,” says the agency dependent on the Ministry of Culture.
In the inventory carried out to prepare the National Plan for Cultural Heritage of the 20th Century, the Institute highlights how, once its hesitant beginnings were overcome, the cinematographic spectacle displayed the “most eloquent indicators of its social and economic impact, among which “There are some attendance figures at the venues that clearly show the position of preponderance that it reached among all the collective forms of leisure enjoyment.”
“From the scale of a neighborhood to that of an entire population, cinemas were outstanding references for a way of living and sharing collective leisure, the dominant one in the central decades of the 20th century,” underlines the organization, which highlights the architectural value of these rooms, since numerous architects and developers “took advantage of the possibilities of formal experimentation offered by this booming business to design ambitious buildings.” In them, he emphasizes, it is possible to identify “a symbolic load denoting the ideas of prestige, progress and modernity, quickly assimilating the new styles and languages that made their way at each stage.” The Lumière, on the verge of complete disappearance, was one of those cinemas whose imprint still lingers in the imagination of the citizens.
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