A Peek Inside a Montmartre Cinema With Mad Surrealist History

....and its idyllic bar-courtyard, tucked away from the tourist traps

Studio 28/image by Courtney Traub/All rights reserved

Dear Subscribers,

As the days shorten and daylight becomes increasingly scarce, I always think there’s an excellent case for ducking into the darkness and spending a couple of hours retreating from the inner chatter— at least, that’s the effect that cinemas typically have on me.

On one of my recent stays in Paris, I was determined to get a better “handle” on Montmartre, an area I’d never spent much time in. In fact, I’d kind of consciously avoided it. The human swarms around the Sacré Coeur and the inevitably tacky, theme-park-like attempts to recreate the neighborhood’s artistic heyday on the Place des Tertres don’t exactly make me want to be there. That, coupled with the fact that this is not an especially accessible area and you have to make a real effort to get up there, meant I’d neglected to really give it much of a chance.

But I recently re-discovered a tiny arthouse theater that I hadn’t been to in over a decade— and it’s done much to correct my sense of Montmartre as being nothing more than a massive tourist trap perched high on the butte (hill) of the same name.