|
Search By:
|
|
18/10/1896: Luxembourg's First Screenings
Movies arrived in the tiny principality of Luxembourg on the 18th October 1896 when 25-year-old local photographer Jacques Marie Bellwald presented a programme of two films to the people of Echternach, a small town on the eastern border. The films, shown in the ‘grande salle’ of the Hotel Straus, were the Lumiere’s l’Arrivee d’un train en gare and La Mer, and some that Bellwald had filmed with his own Cinematographe. “Thanks to the Cinematographe of Bellwald,” trumpeted the press, “the photographs which we know only as fixed and frozen, all move and come alive!”
Four days after this first show, Bellwald installed his ambulant Edison’s Ideal-Cinematographe at the Villa Louvigny in the municipal park of Luxembourg city. The show ran four times daily, for an admission fee of between 30 cents and 1 Mark, until the 5th November.
Two days after Bellwald’s first show at the Villa Louvigny, he had a competitor in the shape of a chap named Adolphe Amberg Jr., who showed a series of films in the Metropole Café. Soon after that a third entrepreneur, the German Wenzel Marzen from Trier travelled the country with his “Theatre Electrique d’Edison et ses photographies animees, parlees et chantees (The Electric Theatre of Edison and his living, talking and singing photographs). Marzen’s shows were accompanied by live music and commentary. [ADD]
Further Reading:
© 2009-2010 moviemoviesite.com