For Director of Cinema and Media Geoff Pingree and Professor of Cinema and Media Rian Brown-Orso, the newly revamped Oberlin Film Society is a dream 16 years in the making. When the College first purchased the local Apollo Theatre in 2009, the pair worked extensively with architects to renovate the space and install a second screening room intended to feature classic and foreign films.
With the relaunch of the Society this semester, that dream has at last become a reality. Community members visiting the Apollo this spring have the rare opportunity to indulge in nostalgia for the films of yesteryear, with 20th-century classics including Blade Runner, The Wizard of Oz, and The Shining returning to the big screen every Tuesday and Sunday night.
The Society represents a revamped collaboration between Cleveland Cinemas — commercial owners of the Apollo — and Oberlin’s Cinema and Media program. As the project’s joint managing directors, Pingree and Brown-Orso have curated a list of thirteen featured films ranging from Ridley Scott’s legendary sci-fi noir Blade Runner to the animated classic Persepolis.
April’s screenings will spotlight the films of visionary director Stanley Kubrick and continue this Sunday at 4 p.m. with dystopian drama A Clockwork Orange, to be followed by Barry Lyndon and The Shining in the coming weeks. Each film will screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday night and 4 p.m. the following Sunday.
For Brown-Orso, the weekly routine is an important part of reframing the Apollo as a community space. She noted her hope that community members will make the regular screenings a part of their routine regardless of the film shown.
“It’s a very old American or global tradition that makes the town a more livable, beautiful place to be,” Brown-Orso said. “In this time, we really feel it’s an important part of being together. … Gathering in person, watching films together as a group on a big screen is a way of creating solidarity and human interaction at a time when everybody’s very divided and separated. The theater is a gathering place — a very historic gathering place — that we want to reactivate and make personal again.”
The lights came down on a packed house at Sunday’s matinee of Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the projector rolled, students and community members were caught off guard by an April Fool’s twist: the opening crawl of Mel Brooks’ 1987 Star Wars parody Spaceballs. Cinema and Media Lecturer Joey Rizzolo pleaded with the theater’s mock controlling intelligence — Apollo 9000 — to play 2001 instead, before fleeing down the aisle in terror as it ominously intoned, “I’m sorry Joey, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
It was a nostalgic moment for the film’s fans, including Pingree.
“To be able to go watch 2001 in a huge theater, I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that again in my lifetime,” he said.
For Cinema and Media graduates Tiago Furtado, OC ’24, and Anni Yang, OC ’24, the Society has become a full-time job. The two have stayed on this year as Apollo Project Coordinators, working closely with Pingree and Brown-Orso to license the selected films from their distributors. Both found it exciting to see the project come together from early concepts to packed screenings.
“It’s really cool to see people coming in, not just from the College, but from the town and the surrounding areas,” Furtado said. “On a Tuesday night, generally, the theater would not be as full as it is now.”
That difference is especially apparent to Joel Mandoke, who moved to Oberlin with his family and began working at the Apollo after growing up in nearby Elyria. For Mandoke, who grew up watching films at the Apollo, the theater is a special place.
“In a time when everything is being streamed and consumed so quickly, we try to slow things down to give films a space to breathe and to bring people together,” Mandoke said. “We’re not just building a Society, we’re building a kind of creative commons for the town. Our goal is a place where people from all backgrounds can gather and watch something meaningful and maybe see the world a little differently afterward.”
This month’s Kubrick series will conclude with A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, each airing at 4 p.m. on Sunday and 7 p.m. the following Tuesday. The final two weeks of the semester will feature North by Northwest — Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller starring Cary Grant — and legendary horror classic The Exorcist. Both May screenings will begin at 7:15 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. respectively. The Oberlin Film Society’s full spring schedule is available on their Instagram page, @oberlinfilmsociety.
