Toward the end of his 1877 novel “l’Assommoir,†Emile Zola describes construction in the working-class neighborhood of Barbès of a boulevard that is to become the address of the luxurious Dufayel department store and, in the early 20th century, of several grand cinemas.
Barbès, in the 18th Arrondissement, is still a working-class neighborhood, and one of Paris’s most diverse and dynamic. On Thursday one of those1920s art-house cinemas has reopens, restored and equipped with state-of-the-art technology.
The Louxor cinema is at the epicenter of the neighborhood, on the corner of the Boulevard Magenta opposite the elevated metro and diagonally across from Tati, the budget department store. The city of Paris spent €25 million, or $32.7 million, to restore it as part of an urban development plan to improve the neighborhood that includes the recently renovated Gare du Nord train station. It is also part of the Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s effort to keep the city’s cinema culture alive: Paris spends €1.2 million a year to bolster independent art-house cinemas.
Built in neo-Egyptian style, the Louxor cinema opened in 1921, designed by architect Henri Zipcy and commissioned by an enterprising businessman called Henri Silberberg who went bankrupt and died shortly after the opening. The Louxor was eventually sold to Pathé Cinemas, which managed it until the Tati company bought it in 1983. The Louxor underwent several transformations under the Pathé management, entirely losing its neo-Egyptian interior, the original mosaics on the exterior of the building and gradually sinking into a state of abandonment. From 1985 until 2003, when it was bought by the city of Paris, the Louxor building was saved several times by petitions. In 2008 the architect Philippe Pumain was given the task of restoring the theater
A few days before the grand opening Mr. Pumain was inspecting the finishing touches being put to the facade the exterior mosaic work was gleaming. Inside, a replica of an ancient Egyptian cartouche hung above the box office. The last brushes of paint were being applied to the ochre walls in the vast Youssef Chahine cinema (named for the celebrated Egyptian director) with a 43-foot-high ceiling, the largest of three theaters in the building, with 340 seats. Mr. Pumain said that the original décor had been covered over by layers of subsequent redesigns but that his forebear’s design was coherent. “It was a mix of Art Deco and Egyptomania,†he said. “Although it was fanciful, you sense that the architect had really done his research.â€
Mr. Pumain and his team based their work on traces of color they found from excavations and two photographs of the theater from 1920. The Youssef Chahine theater has two balconies and a bar on the top floor with a view of the theater on one side, and a terrace on the other that looks out onto an urban panorama with a view of the Sacré Coeur. A nice touch on the upper balcony is a series of three wooden seats with an Egyptian symbol on the backs that came from the original theater and were bought from a collector.
Among the updates is the theater’s encasement in a protective outer box so that vibrations from the metro won’t be felt. It has both a 4K digital projector and a 35-milimeter traditional film projector for the 18-by-30 foot screen.
Mr. Pumain used the cinema’s underground space to build two more theaters,one with a club-like atmosphere in prune-colored velvet, raspberry and gray tones and another with metallic bronze columns and ceiling lights organized in geometric staggered rows.
Zola would have been impressed.
