Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Lifestyle

Show goes on for French cinema deemed world’s oldest, Entertainment News & Top Stories

Show goes on for French cinema deemed world’s oldest, Entertainment News & Top Stories

LA CIOTAT, FRANCE (AFP) – A cinema on France’s Mediterranean coast has won its bid to be recognised as the oldest still in operation by Guinness World Records, 122 years after its first public screening.

The bright-yellow Eden Theatre in La Ciotat, a resort town outside Marseille, showed some of the first films made by Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the engineer brothers considered the inventors of the motion picture.

“It’s the reward for more than two years of research,” Mr Michel Cornille, president of the association that runs the Eden, said in a statement after the Guinness certification was confirmed earlier this month.

The cinema’s former owner Raoul Gallaud was a friend of the Lumieres’ father and became a fan after being invited to their summer home in the region for a private screening in 1885.

Gallaud offered to host a projection a few days later but the attempt was bedevilled by technical problems, and the Lumieres ended up doing their first public screening later that year in Paris.

But four years later, on March 21, 1899, the Eden began showing Lumieres films including Boat Launch At La Ciotat and The Cowboys Of America. That was the date used by Guinness to deem Eden “the oldest purpose-built cinema in operation”.

“It’s very emotional because all my life I’ve watched my family fight so the Eden will continue to live,” said Ms Marie-Laure Smilovich, the cinema’s managing director and a great-grandchild of the Lumiere brothers.

You May Also Like

World

France, which has opened its borders to Canadian tourists, is eager to see Canada reopen to the French. The Canadian border remains closed...

Health

Kashechewan First Nation in northern Ontario is experiencing a “deepening state of emergency” as a result of surging COVID-19 cases in the community...

World

The virus that causes COVID-19 could have started spreading in China as early as October 2019, two months before the first case was identified in the central city of Wuhan, a new study...

World

April Ross and Alix Klineman won the first Olympic gold medal for the United States in women’s beach volleyball since 2012 on Friday,...