1953 Bucharest, Romania

Ioan Velicu

Born 1945

Bucharest Romania

Interviewed on 1/24/2018

by Maria Velicu

The first time I went to the cinema I was about 8 years old. My father loved movies. Before the war each Sunday he would go to four movies in a row. He took me and my younger sister to see a Romania film, The Bugler’s Grandsons. It was about the descendent of the bugler from the war of 1877, the Independence War. A patriotic movie, rather vulgar. I can’t remember the characters or the director. I do remember one scene where the two armies were preparing to fight each other. The captains had feather on their hats and shinny uniforms.

We went to a cinema that was close to our home, Grivita Rosie. It was part of a complex built by the communist party for the workers of the state railway carrier. It was rather small, probably seated three or four hundred people and by today’s standards it would be primitive to say the least, but for that time it was civilized.

The movie was projected on simple cloth and the film strips would break sometimes. Everyone would boo when that happened. There were wooden chairs, all at the same level and there wasn’t really a stage. The floor was treated with creosote to prevent fires, but that gave the room a very specific chemical smell.

The cinemas that were in the center of the city were a lot nicer. Five of theme were on the same boulevard. They were bigger and had velvet seats. New movies were first screened there and only after a couple of days would they be shown in smaller cinemas. I only started going to those when I was in high school.

For a while, one of those cinemas had a “Matinee all day” ticket. You could buy it at any time and stay at the cinema for as long as you wanted. It was a good deal. There were tramps that went there just to have a warm place to stay during winter.

The audience that went to cinema in the outskirts of the city was different from the one at the central cinemas. At the small ones, such as the ones I went to when I was young, a kiss was enough to make the audience go wild and and shout out “Kiss her!”. When westerns appeared there would be folks pretending to be horses, crawling in front of the screen, and children were trying to warn the protagonist: “Watch out! There’s someone behind you!”. At the fancy cinemas the audience was more quiet and many people would go on dates.

All theaters had a man selling paper cones filled with sunflower seeds next to the box office. A ticket was 1.25 lei and the sunflower seeds were 0.25 lei. To give you an idea of what that means, a two pound loaf of bread was 2 lei. Going to the movies was very cheap back then. At the end of each movie a cleaning lady had to swipe the floors to get rid of all the husks. Everyone was eating sunflower seeds, especially since there was no smoking inside.

There weren’t televisions back then and the news were shown in cinemas for 15 minutes, before the movie started. People would still come in during that time.

It was rare to have any empty seats left by the beginning of the movie. Sometimes a movie was so popular they had to be shown all night. I remember I watched Rocco and His Brothers between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. .

Although in general the queue was decent and there weren’t more than fifty people, say, I also remember a couple of times when the queue had thousands of people, overflowing in the street. That happened for American movies.

When I was about 10 years old my parents started to let me go to the movies alone. I would go with two or three friends from the neighborhood. We went on Sunday mornings, when the tickets were cheaper. The movies we saw were either Romanian or Russian with subtitles, so we learned a couple of phrases in Russian. Sometimes there were also movies with Vikings or exotic animals. Of course we loved those.