Pongrácz Erzsébet: The Cinemas of Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
What makes a cinema? A room, however small, is needed. A few comfortable chairs are also useful, but even a wooden bench will do. Some technical equipment is necessary, such as a screen, some live music and of course a reel of film from which rolls miracle after miracle. On 29 April 1896, those who gathered in the conservatory of the café in the Somossy Orfeum (today the Operetta Theatre) were witnesses of a great event - the first moving picture show ever seen in Hungary. (Well, not quite the first, as there had been another show in Váci utca. Then for once, and only once, a few metres of moving images had flickered on a wall for a few minutes.) Barely two months after the Sommossy event, on 22 June, the Sziklay brothers, with no expenses spared, proceeded to turn the new miracle into a commercial enterprise. Having purchased their equipment from the Lumiere company and with their newly obtained permit allowing the operation of a “photographic side-show”, the two Hungarian entrepreneurs opened their (short-lived) “Ikonográf” picture house in a converted shop on the fashionable, elegant Sugár út (where today the Adám söröző is on Andrássy út). The brothers decided to make their own contribution to the excitement stirred by the 1896 Millenary Celebrations by presenting their compatriots with a film commemoration of a genuinely Hungarian event, so they carried their camera to the Városliget (City Park), where Emperor Franz Joseph was making a ceremonial walk. As ill luck would have it, the public showed little interest in the photographic shows of the Ikonográf, not to mention the fact that the camera held in the trembling hands of the first Hungarian “documentary" camera man, overawed with anxiety, recorded a headless emperor! And that effectively put paid to the cinematic careers of Arnold and Zsigmond Sziklay. However, the history of cinema in Pest had been given its rather jerky but irrevocable start. If the elite were not greatly amused by it, the picture house quickly found its place in the noisy world of Pest’s café society. Coffee cops, pictures, cigar smoke The bustling crowds patronising the cafés on Pest's Nagykörút, Rákóczi út and their vicinity greeted with boundless enthusiasm the short film sequences served as side dishes with their coffees and beers. The first projection shows 5
