DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER DRAMA?

Cinemas were once dazzling architectural statements. Now, after decades of the pictures literally getting smaller, there's a renewed appetite for Golden Age glamour.

- Alice Rawsthorn

A glass atrium at the Pathé Palace cinema complex in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano.

When Parisians flocked to the corner of Boulevard des Capucines and rue de la Chausséed'Antin on November 24, 1927, for the opening of what was billed as their city's most spectacular new movie theater, the Vaudeville Paramount Palace, they discovered that its Belle Époque facade housed a sumptuous Art Deco interior. Gold paint glistened on the ceiling of the 1,920-seat auditorium as the Paramount Orchestra played the overture to Wagner's 1867 The Master-Singers of Nuremberg in a prelude to the movie, the Oscar-nominated documentary Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness.

Like so many once-glamorous early-20th-century movie theaters, the Vaudeville Paramount Palace faded during the television age. But the building (or most of it) survived, and it reopened this summer as the seven-screen Pathé Palace after five years of restoration and reconstruction led by Renzo Piano, the acclaimed Italian architect of Centre Pompidou in Paris. He and Pathé, one of Europe's biggest film companies, strove to retain the charm of the original interior while reinventing it as a luxury lair. As well as watching films, visitors can see plays and concerts, quaff wines from the famous Parisian restaurant Le Taillevent, and down cocktails in a bar designed by Jacques Grange, grandee of French interiors whose clients have included Sofia Coppola and the late Yves Saint Laurent.

Its 1929 Belle Époque-style facade.

Not that the Pathé Palace is alone. After decades of decline, when first television and then streaming stole their audience, historic cinemas are now being lovingly restored across the globe, in the hope of transforming them into places we will yearn to visit again.