ABSTRACT
The Neighbourhood Movie House in Montreal
1925-1939: The Harmonious Whole
Harriet T. Kolomeir
1987
The designs of the neighbourhood movie houses in the City
of Montreal were unique to the city by virtue of the interpretation by local architects of
the American movie palaces and movie theatre designs in general. The neighhourhood movie
house was part of an almost exclusively designed corner building complex. The size,
seating capacity, and spatial arrangement of the movie house, first the single and later
the stadium-type auditorium were based on the earlier models of the Beaux-Arts designed
theatre, vaudeville and opera house and the neighbourhood nickelodeon. The technological
advancement of cinematography went hand in hand with the evolution of the designs and
decoration of the neighbourhood movie house. It was in the surface treatment of both the
exterior and interior of the Montreal neighbourhood movie house that the stage-set
character of the decoration shared the magic of the film. Earlier, it was the application
of the neo-classic, pseudo-Egyptian and Spanish surface decoration. The
"machine-inspired designs" that were introduced at the Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 and as a surface decoration
on the New York skyscraper between 1927 and 1931 were expressed earlier both on the
exterior and interior of the Beaux-Arts designed Theatre OUTREMONT and LE CHATEAU. The
architectural designs and surface decoration that followed combined the new machine-made
products and traditional materials which further exemplified the twentieth century
phenomenon of the ever advancing machine technology.
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