The last picture show?

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the first name of former Brattle co-director Connie White was incorrect in some editions of last Sunday's Movies section.)

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the location of the former Garden Cinema was misstated in an article about the Brattle Theatre in Sunday's Movie section. The theater was on Arlington Street in Boston.)

All right, why save the Brattle?

It's a legitimate if unpleasant question. To Ned Hinkle and Ivy Moylan of the not-for-profit Brattle Film Foundation, which has been running Cambridge's legendary repertory movie theater since 2001, the answers are obvious: to stay in business; to keep delivering big-screen film experiences, old and new, to audiences new and old; to fan the fading embers of what once was a vital industry rooted in a vital Harvard Square.

With attendance dropping and government grants withering, though, Hinkle and Moylan have been forced to turn to the audiences who patronize the theater and other investors. The foundation recently announced a fund drive aimed at raising $400,000 by the end of 2005. If that goal isn't met, they say, the Brattle will close.

Theirs is an increasingly quixotic labor of love. The Brattle Theatre is one of two remaining single-screen picture palaces in the Boston area (Belmont's Studio Cinema is the other), an economic dinosaur at a time when any fool knows you need at least three screens to stay in business. Even so, multiple-screen theaters themselves are against the ropes, battered by a combination of economic and cultural factors.

One of those factors is that multiplex movies -- meaning current Hollywood movies -- are uninspiring, if not actively dreadful. Everyone seems to agree on this point. The Brattle's purpose has always been to offer an alternative, and it has always relied on the classic repertory formula of great old films and challenging new ones. A look at a recent schedule shows the ''Greta Garbo Centennial" festival winding down and the Boston Fantastic Film Festival starting up, ''Recent Raves" like Ingmar Bergman's ''Saraband" getting second-run exposure, and the dreamy, acclaimed Thai headtrip ''Tropical Malady" making its area premiere.

This is a good and, in many ways, necessary cinematic mix. It's also apparently an outdated one: Audience numbers are down at the Brattle as much as 40 percent over the past two years. Competition from the nearby Kendall Square is one factor, but location may be the major culprit. The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, saved from the wrecking ball in 1989, is thriving not just because it has three screens and an arguably more broad-appeal selection of American indies and documentaries. More crucially, the Coolidge is strongly supported by the local community and in turn supports it with programs aimed at kids, parents, and midnight-movie fanatics.

The Brattle, by contrast, has always relied on the kindness of college students, and these days the Harvard kids are acting like Stanley Kowalski with ADD, fiddling with podcasting and TiVos, flat-screen TVs and facebook.com. There is so much to see and to download, and 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.

By the late 1960s, the counterculture had kicked in and the repertory cinema movement had transformed Boston's cultural landscape. If you were young and hip at the turn of the '70s, you and your date went to a Kate Hepburn double bill of ''Bringing Up Baby" and ''Sylvia Scarlett" at the Kenmore or the Park Square, both theaters run by a gifted upstart named Justin Freed (he also ran the Coolidge from 1977 to 1988). Or you caught a midnight screening of ''Pink Flamingos" at the Orson Welles, which opened with a torchlight parade in 1969 and at one point also housed a restaurant, a film school, and an adult sandbox. (A question for your next trivia game: The Harvard senior who was the Welles's first house manager? Tommy Lee Jones.)

There was the Nickelodeon near Kenmore Square, programmed by George Mansour, which one weekend in 1982 played ''Diva," ''Diner," and ''My Dinner With Andre" and became the first art house to outgross a mainstream chain. There was the Fine Arts on Mass. Ave. in Boston, where Boston police confiscated and burned a print of Warhol's ''Chelsea Girls" in the late '60s. There was the Symphony on Huntington, the Central Cinema in Cambridge, the Allston Cinema in Allston, the Garden Cinema in Arlington. There was the beloved, bonkers Exeter Street Theater in the Back Bay, owned and operated by Florence and Viola Berlin, two

little old ladies who also ran a Spiritualist temple out of the building and whose programming tastes began and ended with British comedies and ''Miss Marple" mysteries. The sisters refused to put in air conditioning because they could always open the doors and ''get the breeze off the Charles."

All these theaters -- and ones like them in New York, San Francisco, LA, and other cities -- were popular and profitable because they were where the cultural excitement was. Along with rock music, alterna-movies were it; ground zero. As such, they were profoundly influential to filmmakers and audiences alike. The American indie boom of the 1980s and '90s is unthinkable without the jumpstart provided by the film-rep movement. On a more personal note, this writer can draw a direct line from an adolescence spent watching Howard Hawks movies at the Park Square Cinema to a career writing about film in this newspaper and elsewhere. Thank you, Justin Freed.

I also know a woman who says of her first lonely year in Boston, ''The Brattle saved my life." The Brattle started it all, and the Brattle, after a number of changes in ownership and management, is one of the few left standing. The Orson Welles burned down in 1986, not, as some surmised, by an act of God for showing Jean-Luc Godard's ''Hail Mary" but due to a more prosaic electrical fire. The Berlin sisters sold out to a developer who turned the Exeter into a furniture store. The rise of pay cable and home video killed off the others; the arrival of the multi-screen Copley Place art house in 1983 (which closed last December to make room for a Barney's) and Landmark's Kendall Square complex in 1995 provided big-chain body blows to the struggling independents.

In the early 21st century, students are drifting off to shinier things, and other audiences aren't going to the Brattle in viable numbers. Really, can you blame them? 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.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.