Academy 1-2-3 (cinema)
It re-opened in 1931 as the Academy, becoming London's pre-eminent art house cinema, and for over 50 years introduced British audiences to major films, beginning with auteurs such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné; in later years, the Academy largely established the reputations of Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, Satyajit Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó and others in Britain.
[2] The Academy's high standards were maintained by a succession of three managers: Elsie Cohen, George Hoellering and Ivo Jarosy.
The basement housed a ballroom from the early 1950s where the Marquee Club held jazz sessions from 1958 to 1964 with musicians such as Johnny Dankworth, Chris Barber, Alexis Korner and Tubby Hayes.
The Picture House opened on Friday 24 January 1913 as a semi-permanent home for the world's first full-colour feature film, The Miracle, produced as a personal project by Joseph Menchen.
On Friday last the Picture House, Oxford Street, opened its doors for the reproduction of that extremely successful play, "The Miracle", as performed at Olympia.
But even beyond an outward display science plays its part at the picture house, in that the heating and ventilating arrangements are on the most approved system, and fire is certainly considered to be next to impossible.
A special setting has been given to the picture by the erection of the convent and cathedral gates in uralite stone,[n 2] extending across the entire circle.
[34] Hakim had hoped to secure the services of Fritz Kreisler to star in Passion Hunger, a story of a famous violinist and his amorous intrigues; but the deal fell through.
[23] He remained legally bankrupt (although he had plenty of money) for at least 11 years with seven further petitions against him, and divorced Vanna after an affair with Norma Irene Zoe Plumby-Matthews ('Norma Dawn') in late 1945.
[48] However, Elsie Cohen persuaded Hakim to let her manage the cinema, and it opened as The Academy in 1931 with Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth ('Zemlya'), one of the last silent films before the 'talkies' took over.
[26] A typical press advertisement in April 1932 announced G. W. Pabst’s "great epic of the mines" Kameradschaft; Mädchen in Uniform, Mutter Krausen, Road to Life, and Alone by Trauberg and Kozintsev.
[53] During World War II a bomb badly damaged the Academy in 1940, and in the same year Hoellering was interned as an enemy alien.
[55] His right-hand man was his stepson Ivo Jarosy, who started as the Academy's publicist in 1938 and wrote carefully researched press releases.
[56][57] He worked closely with Peter Strausfeld (also interned with Hoellering on the Isle of Man) who created original linocut images for the Academy's distinctive posters since the cinema had a policy of not using any existing publicity material.
[62] Hoellering was approached in 1965 by the writer and filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who was obsessed by Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville and wanted to publish the screenplay.
[66] Organised by Roland Penrose, this groundbreaking exhibition opened on 9 (or 10) February 1948 and included works by Pierre Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Vassily Kandinsky, as well as British contemporaries Francis Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Pasmore and Barbara Hepworth.
The poet and literary critic Herbert Read, co-founder of the ICA, wrote about the exhibition:"Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment.
