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

The regulations of 1929 and 1930 gave more room to professional and economic considerations. Thus followed another upturn in the history of Hungarian cinema.

Between the two world wars, Budapest’s cinematographic map shows a fairly varied picture. While a range of cinemas and distributors offering a varied selection of feature films and supplementary shows suspended, restarted or permanently terminated operations, a new cinematographic industry came into being giving birth to a generation of film makers with a peculiarly Hungarian style. Az Est Hármaskönyve (a three-volume digest issued by the evening paper Az Est) carried an illustrated report entitled “The Cine-Palaces of Budapest” on the best-known cinemas of the city. “Happily, the number of our cinemas is ever on the increase ... Practically no year passes in the Hungarian capital without the inauguration of yet another huge and glamorous cine-palace, whose expert management knows exactly well how to turn the pleasurable diversion of filmgoing into worthwhile artistic experience.”

The appearance of talking films brought further changes to the map of Budapest's cinemas. The new, 1935, legislation was meant to stem the tide of foreign, mainly American, films dominating the industry. The law obliged permit holders to organise their programmes in such a way that at first ten, and then later twenty per cent of all films shown were talking pictures of domestic production with Hungarian dialogue. In the period following the introduction of the new technology, with the continuous appearance of new film makers and cinema proprietors, the major establishments of Budapest’s film history achieved permanence so much so that having survived, with scars of varying depths, the destruction of World War II they remain the best-liked and most characteristic foci of cinema going in Budapest.

Cinemas - a historical map

ÜRÁMIA (early 1900s)

21 Rákóczi út, district VIII

The peculiar building erected in Rákóczi út in the last years of the 19th century in Moorish style originally housed the Oroszy Caprice, later Alhambra night club, which estab13