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

Home of Moving Pictures). Housed in the newly refurbished rooms of the Bonbonniere, a music hall that had recently gone out of business, the establishment became Budapest’s first premiere cinema. Soon enough the Dé- csis came up with another surprise installing, for the first time in town, a system of numbered seats followed by the introduction of a late-night show presenting special films not accessible anywhere else. The Décsis, a “cinema-mad” couple, welcomed their regular guests like personal acquaintances, reserving the accustomed seats for their faithful filmgoers. Their cinema specialised in the choicest, great films, introduced the multiple-act film, presented the earliest Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander films for the first time in the country, and after World War 1 introduced film serials and the first Hungarian newsreels. Following popular usage, the picture house was renamed the Décsi Cinema in 1928, and it was already thus called and its building renovated in 1930 when the cinema installed (among the first in Hungary) the latest technology for screening “talkies”.

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