Corvin Budapest Filmpalast

Stunko on June 19, 2011 at 11:46 am

This one has got to have one of the gaudiest, kitschiest exteriors of any mulptiplex presently operating in Central Europe. Looks like an outdoor museum and amusement park movie house combined into one large mess. The eye-hurting yellow pain does not help a bit.

This used to be a majestic cinema with a a single, huge auditorium, and a large, curved screen with 4-way motorized masking, specifically installed for Todd-AO and other 70mm showings. They showed CinemasCope films here since 1957, and 70mm films from 1967 through the mid-1990s, when the single auditorium was chopped up into 6 tiny rooms.

Some of these rooms now are hardly larger than private use screening rooms. They all have fancy Hungarian names, named after some person who have excelled in the film biz. Too bad that all the Corvin ever shows these days are American commercial popcorn movies. Maybe they show one Hungarian film in a year on one of their screens, that is about it. This is about as fake Hungarian as anything can be.

You can safely skip this one, the Corvin of today has got nothing over your run-of-the-mill hideous multiplexes. Fortunately, there are still plenty of single-screen and twin-screen elegant cinemas in Budapest and elsewhere in this region, might as well patronize those if you care a bit about history and aestehtics.

HowardBHaas on July 19, 2008 at 6:44 pm

Photos of the exterior, all from the last few years:
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details of the exterior:
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old projector:
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