The Wake

Cinema buffs rejoice! For you have a safe haven, a sanctuary, a place to call your own, and you might not of even known it. But you better get there soon, because it might not be around too much longer.

The Oak Street Cinema prides itself in showing classic, repertory, independent and foreign films. They also are a venue for the annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival held every spring. However, suffering from financial troubles and (low?) attendance, the theater’s future looks bleak. The theater had to shut down from June 12 until Labor Day because of low attendance due to construction.

According to a March 2007 City Pages article, the theater and the land it sits on were put up for sale this past spring, which could also put the theater’s future in jeopardy. Currently, the non-profit organization Minnesota Fine Arts owns the area, but might not in the near future.

“If you ask me five years from now are we still going to be running films out of there, [I’d say] probably not,” Minnesota Film Arts’ film programmer Jim Brunzell says. “I can’t predict the future. I hope we’re there in 20 years.”

But as they say in showbiz, the show must go on. The theater re-opened its doors this September with a tribute to the late legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who died this past summer, showing four of his films. The tribute had good attendance numbers.

With the passing of renowned Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, the theater will run another tribute, which begins October 14th, in hopes that cinema buffs will flock to the Oak Street in droves.

“Those are things that you don’t normally get to see on the big screen,” Brunzell says about the classic art house films. “Anyone can go to their video store and probably rent any of these films, but they’re not going to get the same experience.”

That experience of going to a single screen theater is what has kept the Oak Street Cinema going, and most that are involved hope that’s what keeps it open. Joe Midthun, who has been a projectionist off and on for the theater over the past 10 years, has noticed the experience at the Oak is much different than the major movie chains.

“The theater-going experience has changed so much,” Midthun says. “In this auditorium, you really don’t have a lot of people checking their cell phones; you don’t have people talking back at the screen. It doesn’t seem like a huge TV.”

What has also been changing is the line-up of films playing at the Oak Street Cinema. Along with the independent and foreign films shown at the Oak, they occasionally show screenings of major, big-budget films. Recently, they held a free screening of “The Heartbreak Kid,” and will be showing a screening of “Rendition” on October 16. Most believe that the blockbusters like these will get the word of mouth about the cinema going.

“I think it’s great they show screenings here,” Midthun says. “The attendance helps us. Hopefully it gets the word out to the college population.”

Besides the screenings, the other way Minnesota Film Arts and the Oak Street Theater try to promote their films is by a grass roots-like campaign. If you ever see people handing out fliers for free movies on campus, or movies you’ve never heard of, they’re probably from the Oak. Because there is no real budget for ad space in publications, this is the best way to spread the word.

“We can do our flliering. We can do our word of mouth,” Brunzell says. “It’s one of these things where you just go with the flow and hopefully all the hard work you’ve done on a film for two or three weeks pays off.”

Even with all the hard work, ultimately it is up to the movie-going audience to decide the fate of the Oak Street Cinema.

“We’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Brunzell says. “You can’t force people to come see movies. They have to want to see them.”