Pongrácz Erzsébet: The Cinemas of Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

preserved its original architecture to this day - the Broadway. Sunk beneath ground level and indeed the level of the apartment block’s courtyard, the auditorium is accessed via several stairs from a richly ornamented foyer.

The cinema weathered the war as well as changes in its name to receive a new function in 1957, when it became a cinema for archive film screenings under the name Filmmúzeum. Henceforward the establishment played a crucial role mainly in the aesthetic and film-historical education of Budapest’s young, but it was also important for those older people nursing a nostalgia for old films. With the major changes occurring in the nineties the Filmmúzeum also disappeared to give its place to a renewed Broadway Cinema, an establishment releasing box-office hits.

Horizont (1939)

13 Erzsébet körút, district VII

ln 1933, perhaps as part of early preparations for the war to come, the Ministry of the Interior issued a decree obliging cinemas to play newsreels. Budapest’s first newsreel cinema opened in Váci utca, but the genre saw its heyday in this interesting, semi-circular picture house built on the körút to plans by Aladár Múnnich and operated under the auspices of Hungarian Radio. The special programme consisting exclusively of domestic and international news material met with unexpected popular success. During the war, screenings to capacity crowds went on well into the

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