Le Champo, in full Le Champo – Espace Jacques-Tati, is an arthouse cinema in the Latin Quarter of

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. It is notable for being a favorite haunt of important figures in French cinema history.

History

Situated on the corner of Rue des Écoles and Rue Champollion, the single-screen cinema opened in 1938, replacing a bookshop. In 1956, a second screen opened in the basement, replacing a cabaret theatre. Called Actua-Champo, this screen was dedicated to news broadcasts and had its own entrance. A single entrance was installed in the late 1970s. Plans to close the Champo in the early 2000s were cancelled following popular opposition. Le Champo was frequented by well-known French cineastes of the 1960s and 1970s. These included

Claude Chabrol Claude Henri Jean Chabrol (; 24 June 1930 – 12 September 2010) was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave (''nouvelle vague'') group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues an ...

, who called it his "second university", and

François Truffaut François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. After a career of more tha ...

Architecture

The cinema is noted for its striking

art-deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United ...

facade. Le Champo's upstairs screen uses a highly unusual projection system. The projector is situated above the screen and depends on a periscope and a mirror at the rear of the theatre.

References

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