Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr throws down with some cinematic history and explains why we should care about the Brattle's continued existence.
The Brattle... has always relied on the kindness of college students, and these days... going to a wonderfully funky old theater with rear-screen projection and seats bolted onto the floorboards of a former social union club isn't part of the equation. Even the handful of 20-something Garbo freaks out there could have watched the movies in the Brattle festival for free last month on Turner Classic Movies or bought the newly released DVD boxed set for keeping.
The bitter irony in all this is that it was students who originally made a success of the Brattle, and it was the Brattle that created the template for the film repertory boom that swept American cities from the late 1950s until the rise of home video. Some history: Built in 1890 to house the Cambridge Social Union, Brattle Hall had been used as a church, an adult education center, a police-department gym, and a stage when Harvard grads Bryant Haliday and Cy Harvey bought it and installed a
Trans-Lux rear-projection system in 1952. A few years later, Harvey decided to program a Warner Brothers wartime melodrama during final exams, and when the students in the audience stood to sing along with the ''Marseillaise," the cult of ''Casablanca" and Humphrey Bogart was born. Harvey had studied at the Sorbonne, and he modeled the Brattle's programming on Henri Langlois's fabled Cinematheque, handpicking old classics and new foreign fare. When he and Haliday couldn't get the films from overseas they wanted, they started a company, Janus Films, to bring breakthroughs from directors such as Bergman, Francois Truffaut, and Federico Fellini into America, distributing them to other movie houses that began to follow the Brattle model.
The cinetrix has long thought about writing a history of the Brattle/Janus and its founders, but she always imagined that would happen while the theatre was still operating. When I worked there, there were still ancient Cannes programs kicking around the office, gorgeous old first-run one-sheets, as well as who knows what other archival material. The history of the Brattle is the history of European art cinema in America, but it is so much more than that, too.
Back to Burr:
Harvard Square has been corporatized into a mass of banks and chain stores, with little of the boho allure of the film-rep glory days. The Brattle increasingly resembles ''The Little House" in Virginia Lee Burton's classic children's book, surrounded by the type of new that sees the old as merely shabby. People move on; the culture moves on. The Brattle may be more relic than survivor.
Inside, of course, the dreams still burn, no matter how marginalized we make them. If you want to see films the way their makers meant them to be seen -- big as hallucinations, shared by a roomful of strangers -- movie theaters are the only way to do that. Not DVDs, not big-screen TVs, certainly not video iPods. If you really want to see ''Lawrence of Arabia," any other venue is an insult to David Lean. And if you want to preserve the Brattle as more than a shrine to boomer nostalgia, there is only one thing to do: Patronize it. Otherwise, don't cry if one day you find that it's gone.
This theatre was the site of too many film firsts for me to list them all, but I'll name a few moments that flicker brightly: seeing Chinatown for the first time for an undergraduate class and walking out staggered; watching A Bout de Souffle on my birthday; shirking office work to see the crisp new print of Hal Hartley's vertiginous DV flick The Book of Life during a press screening; walking behind the screen during the infamous sex scene in Don't Look Now; recognizing the laughter of someone I was in love with, there on a date with another woman, during L'Enfer.
What about you?
