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The old movie theaters of the Passeig de Gràcia
The change in leisure habits has motivated transformations in the appearance of big cities. Before, movies was consumed in theaters, later on it had to face the competition of television and today, due to the advancement of technology, audiovisual fiction is consumed from multiple platforms. At the same time, in the last decades, most of the exhibition halls have left the urban center to move to large malls and shopping centers and integrate into other forms of entertainment.
As a whole, now there is only one theater in Passeig de Gràcia: Comedia, which are currently owned by Yelmo and which projects films in subtitled original version. At the time, the old Palau Marcet hosted the theater Comedia, and from the year 1960 was given use of cinema room; the original building preserves part of the elegant facade architecture.
There is no longer the Savoy, located at number 86, and it was opened in 1935 with the decoration of the illustrator Joan Vila Rufas d’Ivory, the father of the cartoonist Cesc. In his day, Savoy stood out for the clocks that marked the time of countries around the world in his lobby.
At number 69 on Passeig de Gràcia, in 1931, opened Fantasio cinema, which featured the novelty -at that time- of having cooling, and in which they premiered classics such as Les quatre cents coups, by François Truffaut, and Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock.
Cinema Publi was opened in 1932 at numbers 55-57, built by Josep Maria Sagnier, the son of the architect Enric Sagnier, specialized in news and documentaries. The room was pioneering in morning sessions from the same year of its inauguration and later, in 1967, introduced what was then said art cinema by the hand of Círculo A with the premiere of the film Dreams, by Ingmar Bergman.
The movie theatrer Femina was older and started its activity in 1929, and that it was the first hall of Barcelona to project a movie filmed in CinemaScope, The Robe, from 1953. The Femina was destroyed by a fire in 1991 and no longer opened.