If you turn down Brattle Street, walk a few minutes past Felipe’s, and look below Alden and Harlow, you’ll find one of Harvard Square’s hidden gems. The Brattle Theatre is the only movie theater in Harvard Square, showing a variety of classic, independent, and foreign films every day. Walking up the stairs from its unassuming lobby to the main auditorium, you’ll be greeted with a variety of eclectic movie posters from decades past. The screen sits on a stage built for theater productions, overlooked by a grand balcony of seats.
In the 1920s, the space was used for productions by the Harvard Dramatic Club. Two decades later, it began being used by a theatrical group, the Brattle Theatre Company. One founding member, Bryant Halliday ’47, who acted in the company while at Harvard, purchased the building a year after graduating. Along with fellow actor Cyrus Harvey Jr. ’47, Halliday turned the building into the Brattle Theatre in 1952.
For Dr. Alfred Guzzetti, longtime experimental filmmaker and Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts at Harvard, the Brattle is a fixture of arthouse cinema. “It was here before I arrived, and I hope it’ll be here after I’m gone,” Guzzetti told the Independent. According to Guzzetti, the Brattle stood out from other local theaters at the time for its foray into foreign films. “It was crucial in bringing the contemporary world cinema into the United States on a curated basis.”
The theater’s programming choices had a major impact on Guzzetti’s own personal introduction to foreign films. Guzzetti recalls going to the Brattle to see Kuhle Wampe (1932), a militant film made in Nazi Germany before its screenwriter Bertolt Brecht was forced to flee the country. “It was assumed to be lost because the Nazis hated it…so seeing that film, even in its poor print, was a revelation of a kind of cinema that I didn’t have access to.” Another similarly lost film rediscovered by the Brattle is The Rules of the Game (1939), which, according to Guzzetti, “is probably one of the greatest films ever made… It was released to a kind of tepid reaction in France,” its original film print then lost. The Brattle was able to show a duplicate print of the film, which was also monumental for Guzzetti. He shared, “I was blown away by it and went back to see it [again].”
Step into the projection room behind the screen at the Brattle, and you can feel this variety inside the cornucopia of film prints. Colorful posters of films from various decades and countries adorn the walls. Its shelves house reels upon reels of an abundant library of films, ranging from Casablanca to Mulholland Drive to Casino Royale.
These film prints themselves are another major feature of the Brattle. The projection of movies on actual film is a staple of many arthouse theaters, but this method is much harder to come by at major multiplexes like AMC. The Brattle gives audiences the chance to revisit classics like It’s a Wonderful Life or even recent hits like The Social Network projected on film, providing a warmth and crackle to the screen that cannot be replicated by digital projection. Even the location of the projection room is a theater specialty.
It houses an incredibly rare rear projection system. Most movie theaters project the image onto the screen by shooting light from the back of the auditorium onto the front of the cinema screen. But not at the Brattle. Guzzetti explained that it “turned movies into a kind of magic—a bit like television—where the image doesn’t come from anywhere… It appeared magically, which is a part of what the cinema is, you know, it’s magic.”
The Brattle also boasts a rich history of traditions that have developed a loyal following. Guzzetti shared that the Brattle has always had a “connection with the college rituals of final exams.” The theater had a tradition of screening the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman classic Casablanca during exam time at Harvard. A vibrant mural on the back wall of the auditorium floor depicts art from Casablanca, a clear tribute to the significance of the film at the Brattle.
Guzzetti recalled “taking [his] parents to see a screening of Casablanca to give them some kind of cultural education about the weird culture up here.” He went on, “I remember seeing it through their eyes. For them, it was a movie they had seen, and then, in the Brattle, they went into the sort-of church of Humphrey Bogart, where people came to worship at the shrine of Casablanca… My parents were really struck much more by the audience than by the film.”
The film was most recently shown at the Brattle on Valentine’s Day this year, and the theater continues to share the best of cinema from both the U.S. and around the world. Ned Hinkle, creative director and film programmer at the Brattle for over 20 years, took the reins of the theater in 2001 and turned it into a nonprofit called the Brattle Film Foundation. Hinkle told the Independent that “whether you’re the most learned film scholar in the country, or whether you’re somebody who’s never seen an ‘art movie’ before, the Brattle is a welcoming place, and that’s what [it’s] always tried to be and tried to maintain.” He sees the theater as a “place where anybody can and should feel welcome to come to experience a different kind of perspective on movies.”
The Brattle is a repertory cinema, which, for Hinkle, means “looking at the full range of cinema history, from new films to the first films ever made, and putting that together into a concrete calendar, where things have set periods of time that they’re playing for… That’s been the way it’s been programmed since really the very beginning.” Repertory Series are planned two months at a time by Hinkle. “We always schedule two-month blocks, so we do six calendars a year.” The programming often showcases underrepresented voices in cinema. “The original basic idea behind the theater was really one of discovery and rediscovery, so we continue to stay true to that.” He described the programming process as arcane and alchemical. “We try to mix together films from different decades, films from different countries. Obviously, gender representation is an important factor for us, as is culture and population representation, so we’re just looking to make as wide an array of films as possible over a two-month period of time.”
When choosing specific movies to screen, Hinkle said, “We’ll look at what people might be talking about a lot online, whether that’s on Letterboxd or whether there’s a meme going around that we think might inspire a film series.” For newer films being released, the Brattle will sometimes dive into the range of influences behind it. “Are there movies that are clearly inspired by film history, and how can we create a program that references or connects the movies that a new film might be referencing?” For instance, in the first week of September 2023, the Brattle screened a different film every night that relates to or directly influenced Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—from Jim Carrey classic The Truman Show, dealing with similar themes of existential dread, to Frances Ha, one of Gerwig’s first major acting and co-writing roles.
The upcoming “Space Week Film Festival,” which begins on April 15, showcases Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as more recent sci-fi, like Men in Black, Wall-E, and Gravity. The theater also offers the chance to see new films through the Independent Film Festival of Boston. This year’s Oscar winners American Fiction and The Boy and the Heron also had early, and sometimes free screenings at the Brattle last fall through IFFBoston. Even just last week, the upcoming Ryan Gosling blockbuster, The Fall Guy, was specially screened for members of the Brattle.
Ultimately, the thing keeping audiences coming back to the Brattle post-pandemic is the encouraging support from its community. “People really wanted the Brattle to be there and doing the kind of programming that we do, and they expressed that value by donating money to us to help us stay open. We really did feel dramatically energized by that immediate response after the COVID closure,” Hinkle said. He sees Brattle’s survival through COVID as a testament to audiences’ undying attraction towards the moviegoing experience. “It just comes down to the fact that people really do want to see movies together… If anything was going to actually kill movie theaters, it’s being closed for six months to two years.”
In an age of audiences gravitating towards watching movies on streaming services, local audiences continue to return to the Brattle. “When I go to the Brattle, I see familiar types and faces because there is a diehard remnant of the old cinephile culture,” Guzzetti explained. Speaking on the technological and cultural shift towards the internet and streaming, Guzzetti feels “what [these audiences] don’t get is the sense of a theater and the communal feeling of an audience.”
This is why despite battling a pandemic and a new streaming service every month, according to Hinkle, “there’s still a drive to go to a movie theater to experience your favorite film that you’ve seen a dozen times on screen with an audience.” He sees going to the cinema as a timeless rite that predates the invention of film itself: “Telling stories is the earliest form of entertainment and community building for humans, and I think that that still exists today, where you want to come together in a darkened room, watch a movie together, experience a sense of community.”
That same sense of community is right here in Harvard Square. “That’s why the Brattle is still here. It’s why the Brattle’s always been here,” Hinkle said. “It’s always been the goal of this theater to bring people together to challenge and entertain them. And we’re just gonna keep doing it as long as we can keep the doors open.”
Ari Desai ’27 (adesai@college.harvard.edu) can often be found between classes at the Brattle Theatre.