DRAKEN - Architecture and history by Kjell Furberg
summaries and translation by Stefan Adler

Opening ad for DRAKEN 1956

DRAKEN dressed for its opening night the 26th of April 1956

The large lobby as it originally looked. The red and gray linoleum floor was impossible to renew after it had dried out and cracked. In the seventies a horrible orange synthetic carpet covered the floor, a somewhat better carpet was installed in the eighties (seen on several of the color pictures here) and finally the original floor was re-created just in time for the new millennium.

The lobby's wall of windows towards "Järntorget". The original furniture is still around, but the gray fabric is changed to blue.

DRAKEN's auditorium before the Cinerama fitting in 1960. The proscenium was widened from 13 meters to over 20 meters and the exits were moved upwards in the auditorium. The curtain was widened with a bleached and then re-dyed red curtain from the Victoria, which was installed for 70mm Todd-AO during the same time in 1960

Rear view of the auditorium, under the projection booth. DRAKEN originally seated 742 patrons. The seats were dressed in navy blue Manchester

Opening with the first Cinerama program - "The Seven Wonders of the World" - in 1960. Note the lit Cinerama sign and the gigantic poster on the wall on top of the lobby building.

Projectionist Magnus Elm and chief usher of DRAKEN, Wolfgang Graupner dressing the facade for "The Return of The Jedi" in 1983. It took 4 kW:s of floodlight to light up this one...

"Järntorget" as a commercial cinema center of Western Sweden. Both DRAKEN and the Prisma showed Astrid Lindgren's "Ronja - the robber's daughter" for sold out houses. DRAKEN between the 14th of December 1984 to the 2nd of May 1985.

The lobby as it looked during the eighties and pretty much of nineties. There was no possibility what so ever to re-furnish all the original materials and the original floor. I tried but had no chance at all to get the money for it from "SF". Note the blue refreshment stand in the rear. DRaken was the first cinema in Sweden to sell popcorn and the last cinema to install candy-machines instead of manual service. Pleasantly enough the original floor has now been re-created through support by the Gothenburg City Museum. From January 1999 you can again experience the lobby in its original splendor!

Standard looks of DRAKEN in the eighties. Fully decorated, fully lit, not a broken bulb. DRAKEN was so bright it pretty much made the rest of "Järntorget" look as a black hole. The picture is taken in 1985. Note that both the sold-out signs are lit.

With trumpets and fanfares and a written prologue "AB Cosmorama" opened its new elegant big theater DRAKEN at "Järntorget" in Gothenburg the 26th of April 1956. The opening film, the colorful Italian adventure and travelogue "Lost Continent", was showed in the wide format of CinemaScope on the record-breaking large screen - measuring impressive 12.6 meters.

DRAKEN was a magnificent premiere theater and by that a forceful manifestation of the enormous importance of movies in the post-war cultural life. A movie palace of supreme class for the people, a place for gala with the highest ambitions of quality for art and architecture.

The Cosmorama theater chain had previously had a theater - "Nya Teatern" in the old labour movement building at "Järntorget", at the same site where you now find the newspaper "Arbetet". DRAKEN came to be a part of the last generation of big theaters, built the very same year as television started in Sweden.

Movies opening at DRAKEN always did an exclusive first run there, before going on general release in the region, so the entire cinematic audience of Gotheburg had to do an enthusiastic pilgrimage to "Järntorget".

DRAKEN was built as a complement to the grand new Labour Movement Building, ready in 1952 at "Järntorget". The building with the cinema and the "Vågen" ballroom was drawn by the same architect as the main buildings, Nils Einar Ericsson (1899-1978). He was the co-worker of Gunnar Asplund during the Stockholm fair in 1930 and was already in 1935 widely known and famous for his masterpiece the Gothenburg Concert Hall, "Konserthuset" at "Götaplatsen". Nils Einar Ericsson did also do the thorough and radical reconstruction of the "Cosmorama" cinema in the mid thirties and was responsible for the Park Avenue Hotel at "Avenyn", ready in 1950.

DRAKEN's entrance is very striking; a large canopy carried by four tessellated columns, crowned with the name DRAKEN and a Viking ship in neon, made by the artist Gunnar Erik Ström. The two floors of the lobby are clearly exposed by the glassed-in facade.

From the outside you enter into a mahogany colored ticket- and booking office with built in poster and advertisement cabinets, a wooden clock with a convex clock-face and a pale yellow/white floor of marble from Ekeberg. An elegant slightly curved staircase of white marble leads up to a large, airy and luxurious lobby with glass walls towards "Järntorgsgatan" with a clear view out on the city life. The wall facing the auditorium is dressed in Italian gray/brown marble a k a "Lidomarble". The double doors into the auditorium are made of mahogany from Honduras with "Right" and "Left" in large brass letters on top of them. The long sofas in the lobby are original and comes from "NK" (The Nordic Company). The brass lightning in the ceiling with naked bulbs, so typical for its age are also original. The original floor, with its big red squares in a grey frame was damaged and had to be removed. During a long period of time it was the only important thing that wasn't left of the original decoration. By the beginning of 1999 the floor was re-created and the lobby is now pretty much in its original design.

The auditorium presents itself with one complete field of seats with a good slope and perfect views towards the screen. At first you are struck by the great space - a mighty, high and arched room, narrowing slightly towards the front in a soft arch. The walls lean slightly inwards and are dressed in mahogany from Honduras. Rumors say - no matter how incredible it may sound - that the entire 1000 square meters decoration is from one single log of mahogany. On top, the walls bend softly inwards and meet the dark blue ceiling, with built in hidden lights. The rear wall leans heavily towards the auditorium for acoustical reasons. As a movie theater, the construction of DRAKEN is built on the achievements of the thirties, where soundfilm and functionalism (modernism) walked hand in hand. This was when the modern cinema was born, liberated from the older traditions of the theater. Nils Einar Ericsson's Concert Hall of Gothenburg may also have been a model when he created DRAKEN.

The soft and streamlined architecture of DRAKEN gives a slight association to the forms of a ship - a theme that is close at hand here in the shipping town of Gothenburg and was used already during the forties for the cinemas "Kaparen" and "Fyren" at "Stigbergstorget".

A colorful view is the unique curtain of blue velvet with a hand painted work of art by the major cinema decorator of Gothenburg, Gunnar Erik Ström (1892-1982), the same artist who designed DRAKEN's neon sign. The dragon on the curtain isn't of Chinese origin, similar to the dragon by Isac Grünewald in the "Draken" cinema of Stockholm from 1938. In Gothenburg it had to be a Viking Ship Dragon - and this decorates not only the curtain, but also the neon sign as earlier mentioned. Gunnar Erik Ström is widely known for his first class artistic decorations in several cinemas in Gothenburg. He made the paintings in the ceiling at the "Palladium", as well as figurative decorations in brass wire on the sides of the balconies of "Cosmorama". He also made the beautiful allegorical paintings on the pro-scenium at "Flamman" and the "Kaparen", where he made stuccowork in the auditorium. He also made glass- and mirror paintings on the Swedish America Line's cruisers m/s "Kungsholm" and m/s "Stockholm".



When DRAKEN opened in 1956 its seats were blue and counted 742.
When re-opening the 22nd of September 1995 the seating counted 713 red chairs in 27 rows.

DRAKEN wrote itself into the Swedish history of cinemas in a very special way in 1960. December 14 was the opening date for the three-panel giant format Cinerama. This system gave an amazingly large and clear image by sycronized projection with three projectors. With three images fitted to each other a gigantic image was built. The Cinerama screen was over 20 meters wide, so the entire proscenium had to be rebuilt. The curtain was also widened. This modification was done very cautiously and is still intact to this day. The first movie to be shown in Cinerama was "The Seven Wonders of the World". Only two more theatres in Sweden could show Cinerama: "Vinterpalatset" in Stockholm (unfortunately demolished in the late seventies) and "Royal" in Malmoe. The Cinerama system was intended to be the movie business competitor to the strong threat of television, but didn't last long. The system was technically ungainly and expensive.

In 1966 the two Favorit 70 projectors who still are in operation were installed. With these you can show both standard 35mm and 70mm films. 70mm gives a larger and clearer image than 35mm CinemaScope and both these systems have survived into this day. DRAKEN's projectors have the strongest light in Gothenburg and its screen is still by far the largest in town! DRAKEN can host all formats from 70mm down to 16mm and its amplifiers carry all analog sound systems and also digital Dolby sound.

Svensk Filmindustri, in charge of DRAKEN since 1964 has now left the theater to the Gotheburg Film Festival and they in their turn have left the operation of DRAKEN to the original owners, "Folkets Hus", while DRAKEN, already well known as a festival theater has set sail into the new millennium as a well equipped, technically up-to-date modern cinema. With an architecture and decoration almost in its original design, DRAKEN is packed with cinematic feeling and a scent of gala. DRAKEN is a child of its times in many ways, but also very unique and one of the most well kept and historically most interesting cinemas of Sweden. The county agency for cultural preservation is presently working for making it a legally protected environment.

The movie audiences of Gothenburg, film distributors and the Gothenburg Film Festival are warmly congratulated to the possibility of keeping DRAKEN!

Kjell Furberg, cinema theatre historian from "Leve DRAKEN", Filmkonst nr 34 published by Göteborg Film Festival

Text carefully adapted and translated by Stefan Adler 2000-06-20
 

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