Ode to the Paris cinema

A guest essay from writer Niccolò Martelli

I can count on more than one hand the friends I have in Paris who go to the movies regularly. I average twice a year but watch series and films at home. After a long conversation over coffee with my friend Niccolò, who came directly to our rendez-vous from a showing of Le Città di Pianura, I realized I may be missing something vital. Since I’m traveling for the next ten days, I asked him to contribute a few thoughts on one of his greatest loves.

Ps. Can anyone name the cinema that was photographed and mentioned in The New Paris?

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Photo by Kateryna Horska on Unsplash

When I turned fourteen, I realized, perhaps for the first time, that my future would be less vibrant than I imagined. Cinema Variety, where I grew up spending my weekends, was shut down and replaced by a supermarket chain. I was crushed. Florence, once the cradle of the Renaissance, is a city prepared to sell off each of its neighborhoods to the highest bidder. Because of gentrification and globalization, the Florentine cultural scene has gradually become flatter; local shops get pushed out by cheap steakhouses, fast food chains and fake leather shops. Every possible contemporary art exhibition is greeted with timid smiles by the few remaining residents left in the city center, still anchored in the fifteenth century. Among the businesses that have suffered the most, it was the film industry that gave me the sense that Florence’s future would be full of supermarkets and KFCs, not cinemas. Since 2010, almost half of the city’s cinemas have shut down and the few remaining are either half-empty independent movie theaters or multiplexes showing only the most commercial films on the market.

I’m thirty now and no longer living in Florence. After a few years studying and working across Stockholm, New York, and Milan, I moved to Paris in 2024. Once I settled in, I realized what it really means to live in a city that prioritizes a balance between mass tourism and a living local culture. I found the Ville Lumière to be among the most successful at resisting the homogenizing pull of mass tourism, and part of that includes protecting cinemas. Since 2010, less than ten percent of them have shut down, largely because locals still love going to the movies and consider supporting them as a moral obligation. France was the only major film market in Europe where attendance grew in 2024, with almost half of tickets sold going to French movies.

Photo: Niccolò Martelli

Cinémas d’art et d’essai are still everywhere in Paris and because of that, moviegoers are gently encouraged to watch old and magnificent movies by Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock instead of the thirty-seventh Marvel chapter. One of the real declarations of love for cinema is offered by Paris Ciné Info, a very pragmatic and easy-to-use website to check showtimes. You can search movies based on the day, new releases, languages, and other filters, including the cinema card. In an effort to focus my attention on getting the most out of this city and its vibrant culture, I cancelled my Netflix subscription, which was honestly only useful to me for rewatching The Office for the fifteenth time and Zerocalcare’s series. Instead, I got myself a UGC Illimité card, a wonderful membership that allows me to see films at every UGC and Mk2 cinema as many times as I want, but above all to get into practically all the cinémas d’art et d’essai—for only 20€ a month. It was a no-brainer.

Now, I go to the movies at least once a week. With tickets costing 13€ on average, getting the pass was the smartest thing I could do. It’s what got me to spend a wonderful Wednesday evening watching Psycho for the first time at the cozy Ecoles Cinéma Club, The Last One for the Road at the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts on a Saturday morning, and Mulholland Drive at the Studio Galande. Next week, I have plans to see A Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone at the Studio des Ursulines.

The people who go to these cinemas sit in reverent silence, as if inside a temple, to enjoy high-quality masterpieces--maybe because they are incurable romantics waiting for a future far from smartphones and closer to Midnight in Paris, where you might find a very drunk Hemingway stumbling around the fifth arrondissement. Perhaps the audience wishes they lived in an era where cinemas were still a fun outing among friends and not just a place to find the rare few who enjoy movie more than Hyrox.

These people, myself included, will typically walk out of the cinema and immediately start scrolling through their Instagram feeds, looking for something to blame the present for, while gearing up to lecture their partners, who skipped the film entirely, about how much better life was when Hitchcock was alive— never mind that they weren’t even born yet. So long as Paris fights to keep its arthouse cinemas open, hopefully inspiring other European cities to follow suit, we can remain calm, place our faith in humanity, and pray that AI doesn’t strip our ability to argue about it. Lunga vita al cinema!

KEEP READING (& LISTENING)

• A new look for the Elysées Lincoln theater

• What the New Wave cinema movement tells us about contemporary France

• Louvre heist will be turned into a film (of course)

• Saved by fans, historic Paris arthouse cinema La Clef reopens

French Cinema in Paris

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