Bellevue Theater is a small theater located in

Paco Paco is a Spanish nickname for Francisco. According to folk etymology, the nickname has its origins in Saint Francis of Assisi, who was the father of the Franciscan order; his name was written in Latin by the order as (father of the community); ...

district,

Manila Manila, officially the City of Manila, is the Capital of the Philippines, capital and second-most populous city of the Philippines after Quezon City, with a population of 1,846,513 people in 2020. Located on the eastern shore of Manila Bay on ...

Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...

. The theater adopted Philippine Islamic imagery as its art deco theme, borrowing inspiration from the tradition of moro-moro theatrical scenography.

Architecture

The theater was symmetrical, with a central plane of decorative concrete pierced work that covers almost the entire facade and flanked by two rectangular volumes topped with domes on both sides. At ground level, the cinema opened to a small foyer that led to a pseudo-grand staircase, which was guarded on both sides by sculptures of harem maidens. At street level, there are two emergency doors with pointed arches on the opposites sides of the façade. Out of the listed twenty movie houses surveyed by the

American Express Company American Express Company or Amex is an American bank holding company and multinational financial services corporation that specializes in payment cards. It is headquartered at 200 Vesey Street, also known as American Express Tower, in the Batte ...

in their tourist guidebook Manila and the Philippines, only two of them survived today: the

Manila Metropolitan Theater The Manila Metropolitan Theater (), also known as the Metropolitan Theater, abbreviated as the MET, is a historic Philippine Art Deco building located in Plaza Lawton in Ermita, Manila. It is recognized as the forefront of the Art Deco archite ...

(1931) on

Padre Burgos Avenue Padre Burgos Avenue, also known as Padre Burgos Street, is a 14-lane thoroughfare in Manila, Philippines. The road was named after Jose Burgos, one of the martyred Gomburza priests who were executed at the nearby Bagumbayan Field (presen ...

, Manila, and the last fully functional single-screen theater, the Cine Bellevue (1933) in Paco, Manila, which had an Orientalist leitmotif that employed the Neo-Mudejar

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French (), is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first Art Deco in Paris, appeared in Paris in the 1910s just before World War I and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920 ...

strain and has been converted into a clothing store.

References

{{reflist Theaters in Manila Former cinemas Buildings and structures in Paco, Manila Theatres completed in 1933 Art Deco architecture in the Philippines 1933 establishments in the Philippines