Cinema Dreams

Sometimes they seem futuristic and bizarre; sometimes they resemble marvelously decorated theater halls: they are old cinemas from around Europe, photographed by the photographer Sylvia Ballhause, born in 1977 in Halle. Ballhause takes us on a thorough search for traces of pieces of a lost world, like the Urania cinema in Budapest, the Lucerna cinema in Prague, the Emek cinema in Istanbul, the Atrium cinema in Nuremberg, and many more.

The strong formal approach of the photographer proves to strike the right balance. She always takes a central perspective, concentrating on the structuring elements of the architecture: rows of chairs, ledges, curtains, lighting, decorations, so that even opulently decorated cinema theater halls appear rigorous and heavily structured. It is the formal similarity of these rooms that primarily catches the eye. Blocks of seats symmetrically lined up thrive in alignment to illuminated velvet curtains – sometimes surrounded by plastering, sometimes by glimmering décor. The rooms seem surreal, as if they enclose all those who anticipate the artificial celluloid images in a dream world.

The design of the cinema halls creates an in-between world, an architectural cable connecting dream and reality. Although the movie hasn’t yet begun and the screen and theater are empty, the atmosphere created by the architecture gives one the feeling of being in a movie or a part of a magical illusion.

Each of the theater halls has its own face with its own lovely details, its original charm evoked by the compositional stringency of Ballhause’s images – standing in total contrast to the anonymous austerity and uniform facilities of the multiplex movie theaters of our time. Sylvia Ballhause’s photographic search is not only a formal approach to traces of a forgone form of architecture, it is also a memory of the nostalgic longing for a more soulful past.

Geraldine Blum