Under Paris, a Secret Cinema Vanished. Do Not Try to Find Us.

Under the streets of Paris there is a second city made of empty space.

For centuries, Paris was built from limestone dug out from beneath itself. The old quarries left behind hundreds of kilometers of tunnels.¹ In the late 1700s, when the city's cemeteries overflowed, officials moved the bones of millions of Parisians into part of those tunnels. Skulls and thigh bones were stacked into walls, in patterns, by the cartload. Today a small section is open to tourists as the Catacombs of Paris.¹

The rest is off-limits. It has been illegal to enter since 1955.¹ People go anyway. They call themselves cataphiles. They trade hand-drawn maps, because there is no official map of all of it, and they hold parties, concerts, and art shows in chambers deep underground.

In 1793, a doorkeeper at a Paris hospital named Philibert Aspairt went down into the tunnels with a candle. He never came out. His body was found eleven years later, in 1804, just a short walk from an exit. He was identified by the ring of keys still on his belt.² He is buried where they found him.

In September 2004, French police on a training exercise in the tunnels found something stranger than bones.³

A cinema.

A large chamber had been fitted with a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, rows of seats carved into the rock, and a bar. It had professionally installed electricity and at least three phone lines. There was a collection of films, from old black-and-white noir to recent thrillers.³

Three days later, police went back with experts to find out who had built it.

The power and phone lines had been cut. The equipment was gone. In the middle of the floor was a note.

Do not try to find us.³

Nobody ever officially identified who ran the cinema.

Lucie Bernard restored old film for a living. She spent her days in a cold, dark lab, cleaning scratches out of movies that had not been seen in eighty years. She liked dead things that could be brought back.

At the flea market at Porte de Vanves, an old man was selling film canisters by the kilo. Most were empty. One was heavy.

Inside was a reel of 16mm film, a sheet of tracing paper folded small, and a ticket stub. The stub was thick cardboard, printed with one word. SÉANCE. In French it means a screening. In English, it means something else.

The tracing paper was a map. Not of the streets. Of the tunnels underneath them. Hand-drawn in fine ink, with chambers marked and named. One chamber, deep under the 16th arrondissement, near the Trocadéro, was circled.

Beside it, three lines:

Admission by ticket only.

Leave before the lights come up.

Never watch your own reel.