Cinema radium

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Radium cinema, view of the building at the end of February 2014
View from the Lindenhof over the Limmat with the Rudolf-Brun-Bridge , the red-brown building in the center of the picture housed the cinema Radium, 2007

The Radium cinema was one of the first fixed cinemas in Zurich . It existed from October 12, 1907 to June 30, 2008 in the eastern part of the building at Mühlegasse 5 . In the year after the building was closed, a stack of hidden film posters and other printed matter was found during the renovation of the building , most of which date from before 1920 and are considered a sensational find in film history.

location

View over the Uraniabrücke (today Rudolf-Brun-Brücke) into the Mühlegasse. The gable wall of the house on the left side of the street barely shows the writing “KINO RADIUM”.

The Radium cinema was located in the Niederdorf of Zurich's old town in the eastern part of the Mühlegasse 5 building. The town hall and the Predigerkirche are nearby . The Haifisch nightclub is located in the neighboring historic building Mühlegasse 3 ( Rotes Mühlerädli ), an Indian restaurant and an IT service provider have rented an Indian restaurant and an IT service provider on the ground floor of Mühlegasse 5 ( Zur Schwarzen Stege ), and apartments are located on the first to third floors.

Mühlegasse 5 is a three- to four-storey residential building with no basement, on the western ground floor of which there were still stables from the Limmat mills in the early 20th century . Since the late 18th century, a carriage shed had been housed on the first floor of the eastern section and stretched backwards. In mid-1907, the house owner first converted the carriage house into a shop. In the same year, the Radium cinema was installed there, the design came from the Zurich architects Huldi & Pfister. For the cinema, the ceiling was removed in the cinema area so that the resulting projection room comprised the ground floor and the first floor. The windows on the first floor were initially only temporarily closed. At the bottom right was the main entrance, which led directly to the street.

Sometime between 1915 and 1928 almost all the windows on the first floor were bricked up. The resulting area, which is around 15 meters wide and two meters high, was designed in 1928 by the facade painter Emil Morf (1867–1949) in the way that is still visible today with the words “KINO RADIUM”. The Zurich Monument Protection Department described the painting in a report: “The facade painting is a valuable testimony to the color movement of the interwar period. Parallel examples can only be found in the area around the “ Colorful Magdeburg ” under Bruno Taut . Formally, it can also satisfy strict aesthetic requirements. " In 1982 the facade painting was extensively restored. By then it had survived 54 years. The facade painting that characterizes the image of the building and Mühlegasse is now a listed building.

movie theater

Advertising postcard for the opening, 1907
Mühlegasse 3 and 5, around 1915

There have been film screenings in Zurich since 1896 with mobile devices. Contrary to information in media reports and the scientific literature, which describe the Radium cinema as the first cinema in Zurich, there were already two fixed movie theaters before that. A permanent cinema had already been set up in Geneva in 1906, and other Swiss cities quickly followed in 1907. In Zurich, too, the first applications for approval had already been submitted in autumn 1906, and in March 1907 the film pioneer Jean Speck received the corresponding approval. His cinematograph Speck was opened in April 1907 near the train station on Waisenhausstrasse. Also near the train station, on Löwenstrasse, Anton Fischer and Carl Simon-Sommer opened a cinema at the end of March 1907, and they only obtained the necessary permits afterwards. Both also set up the Radium cinema in Mühlegasse, but Fischer withdrew before it opened. The Radium cinema was then opened on October 12, 1907.

The Radium cinema was a small shop cinema typical of the early days of cinema, which in terms of area and equipment could not keep up with the large luxury cinemas. The projection room was long and narrow, but because of the removed ceiling it was at least high enough to raise the screen and allow most viewers an unobstructed view. This was hung on the wall of the hall facing Mühlegasse, partly in front of the windows on the first floor. To the right under the screen was the main entrance to the cinema, which led directly onto the street. The furniture in the unadorned hall consisted of simple wooden chairs and a piano for the musical accompaniment of the silent films .

The cinema market in Zurich quickly became fierce. With his large and splendidly furnished houses near the train station, the Cinema Palace and the Cinema Orient , the Swiss cinema pioneer Jean Speck dominated the market and left little room for small operators like Simon-Sommer with his Radium cinema. The typically aggressive advertising of the cinemas also included the exaggerated presentation of their own size and importance. The Radium cinema advertised unrealistic with the “largest screen area” and with “space for 300 people”. In fact, the files of the building police only occupy 150 places. The cinema advertising also shaped the external appearance of the Radium cinema. Every usable area of ​​the facade was used as advertising space, and “KINO RADIUM” was also written on the gable wall of the building facing the Limmat. While this was still typical for a large number of entrepreneurial activities, including retail and gastronomy, the Radium, like other cinemas, had outdoor advertising typical of the cinema. This included wooden boards with film posters on the outside wall, showcases with photos and movable boards on the footpath in front of the cinema during opening hours.

The cramped conditions repeatedly prompted the planning of extensions. As early as 1909, an application was made to build a cinema with 250 to 300 seats for the neighboring property at Mühlegasse 3. In 1915 a significant expansion of the radium was planned. Fire protection permits were refused for both projects.

In the 1930s, the Radium was a well-known western cinema, which is why it was also known as the revolver kitchen . Since the mid-1970s, the Radium cinema had been an art house with a sophisticated program under the direction of This Brunner from Arthouse Commercio Movie AG , which operated several cinemas in Zurich. The decline of the industry also hit the radium. From 1994 until it was closed it was a sex cinema . The cinema closed at the end of June 2008. In the more than a hundred years of its existence, it had never been fundamentally modernized. While the cinema Royal in Baden was saved from demolition by citizen protests and continues to exist as the Kulturhaus Royal Baden , nothing remains of the Zurich cinema Radium apart from the facade painting. The house owner would have preferred if after the renovation of the building a cinema would have moved in again or a "related" form of use had been possible. However, no operator had been found for this.

Poster find

Kino Radium, Zurich, movie poster from October 31, 1912 for tormenting hours ( La Fossa del Vivo , Italy); The stronger love ( The Greater Love , USA) and Providence ( The Will of Providence , United States). Two-color print, Atelier Monopol, Zurich 1912, 76 × 100 cm.
Olympia Kino and Kino Radium, Zurich, joint poster dated October 16, 1913 for The Two Sergeants ( I Due Sergenti , Italy). Two-color print, K. Graf, Bülach 1913, 64 × 94 cm.

In the summer of 2009, lumber was removed from the roof structure as part of the renovation work. An employee of the Zurich City Archeology found a pile of historical film posters and other printed matter behind wood paneling that had apparently been hidden. They were almost completely salvaged, restored and scientifically processed.

The find includes 90 film posters (38 different and 52 duplicates in up to 12 copies), 68 program slips (with 62 duplicates), some issues of the industry magazine Kinema and other material, mostly from the years 1911 to 1914. The oldest poster was an illustrated German-language one Distribution poster with the title "The honor lost - everything lost" from 1907. The most recent finds to be dated were a newspaper article and a program leaflet from the 1930s, which indicate when the older pieces were put down. The poster inventory comprised 22 international rental posters, mostly illustrated, and 16 Swiss drafts, almost all of which were text posters. The 69 advertised films come from Germany, the USA, France, Italy, Denmark, Great Britain, Austria and Russia. Most of them were badly damaged and in some cases only preserved in small fragments.

Many of the posters found were prints on behalf of the Radium cinema. They were mostly produced using inexpensive two-color printing. A further cost reduction was made possible by printing posters with the colored frame in large quantities in stock, which were then provided with the film-specific black imprint only in the required number.

From a film-historical point of view, the poster find is considered “spectacular”. The controversial aggressive poster advertising contributed to the bad reputation of the cinema in its early days. This indirectly led to a deterioration in the tradition of film posters and other commercial graphics in the film industry. The Zurich Fund gives an insight into the advertising activities of one of the first Swiss cinemas.

With the 16 Swiss cinema posters, the number of known posters from the period up to 1920 more than doubled; previously only 12 were known. The fact that most of the posters in the film history collections have been purchased individually in recent times and the reference to their origin and contemporary environment can no longer be reconstructed is of particular importance. In addition, the source is an “average cinema” in Switzerland. The sophisticated poster designs commissioned by large cinemas, such as the work of Otto Baumberger , are strongly overrepresented in collections. The reality of the film industry was shaped by small financially weak houses, whose comparatively simple advertising is partially made accessible through the poster found.

The restored posters are in the Zurich City Archives. From February to May 2011, an exhibition of the restored cinema posters and other exhibits on the history of the house at Mühlegasse 5 took place in the Zurich Haus zum Rech under the title “Find location cinema - archeology in the Radium cinema”.

literature

  • Christoph Bignens: Cinemas - Architecture as Marketing. Cinema as a mass cultural institution. Themes of cinema architecture. Zurich cinemas 1900–1963 . Rohr, Zurich 1988
  • Bernadette Fülscher: Art in the public space of the city of Zurich. 1300 works - an inventory . Chronos, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-0340-1084-9
  • Adrian Gerber: sensation in the rubbish cinema! Archeology of cinema advertising in Switzerland around 1910 using the example of the Radium cinema in Zurich . In: moment. Konstanzer Hefte zur Medienwissenschaft , Volume 56/57. Schüren, Marburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89472-656-0 , pp. 11-29, doi: 10.5167 / uzh-84820
  • Adrian Gerber: Between propaganda and entertainment. The cinema in Switzerland at the time of the First World War . Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-89472-837-3
  • Adrian Gerber, Andreas Motschi: The poster find from the Radium cinema in Zurich. Movie posters from 1907 to 1914 and other materials . Urban Development Office, Zurich 2011, PDF, 28.4 MB
  • Kino Radium (Ed.): Radium Kurier. Anniversary edition . Self-published, Zurich 1977
  • Kino Radium (Ed.): Radium Kurier. 2nd anniversary edition . Self-published, Zurich 1982
  • Bruno Maurer: Colored Zurich . In: Hermann Herter, City Architect of Zurich (1919–1942). Archithesis 2/1995. ISBN 978-3-03862-053-2

Web links

Commons : Kino Radium  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Adrian Gerber: Sensation im Schundkino , p. 5.
  2. ↑ a b c City of Zurich, Building Department (Ed.): Spectacular find in the Radium cinema , February 14, 2011, accessed on January 28, 2019.
  3. ^ A b Adrian Gerber: Sensation in the Schundkino , p. 8.
  4. ^ A b c d e Adrian Gerber: Between Propaganda and Entertainment , pp. 115–117.
  5. ↑ Mühlegasse 5, Zurich. Renovation 1982 and TransAtlantique 1983 , Film-Schlumpf website, accessed January 27, 2019.
  6. ^ A b Adrian Gerber: Sensation in the Schundkino , p. 4.
  7. ^ Adrian Gerber: Sensation im Schundkino , p. 3.
  8. ↑ Mariann Sträuli, Karin Beck, Halina Pichit, Nicola Behrens, Christian Casanova, Max Schultheiss: Kinofieber: 100 years of Zurich cinema history , website of the Presidential Department of the City of Zurich, approx. 2007, accessed on January 28, 2019.
  9. ^ Adrian Gerber: Sensation im Schundkino , p. 6.
  10. ↑ Elmar Melliger: The light is off in the “Radium”. In: Altstadt Kurier.
  11. ↑ a b The last credits in the oldest cinema in town , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , July 3, 2008, accessed on August 29. January 2019.
  12. ↑ a b Urs Bühler: Silent Witnesses from the Silent Film Era , Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 15, 2011, accessed on January 28, 2019.
  13. ↑ a b c Adrian Gerber: Sensation in the Schundkino , pp. 18-19.
  14. ^ Adrian Gerber: Sensation im Schundkino , p. 10.

Coordinates: 47 ° 22 '27.8 "  N , 8 ° 32' 36.6"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and eighty-three thousand four hundred forty-three  /  247648