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IT SHOULD have been a happy year for the Harvard Film Archive. Last fall, the institution commenced its silver-anniversary festivities with a benefit premiere of Mystic River at the Sanders Theatre, with author Dennis Lehane manning the podium and a videotaped birthday salute from director Clint Eastwood. Then in November, the HFA commemorated the opening of its new season by replaying the first film ever to be shown there, Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 Oscar Wilde adaptation Lady Windermere’s Fan, accompanied by a live piano, followed by a special screening of Errol Morris’s recent The Fog of War.

But 2004 hasn’t gone as planned. First there was a canceled visit from Harvard alumnus and HFA advisory-board member Tommy Lee Jones, who’d been tentatively scheduled to appear as part of a Norman Mailer tribute. Then in January, Dean Kirby, head of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department, quietly announced that the HFA would be moved from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies to the Harvard College Library, reallocating managerial control from HFA curator Bruce Jenkins to Fine Arts librarian Katharine Martinez.

This wasn’t the first time in recent memory that the dean of FAS had taken power away from the VES artistes and given it to the bookworms. In 2001, after a messy bout of infighting later documented in the New Yorker, FAS dean Jeremy Knowles, Kirby’s predecessor, jettisoned VES chair Ellen Phelan, a painter with New York art-world connections who’d been recruited to vivify Harvard’s languishing studio-arts program, and gave the chaired position to someone outside of VES — namely, English Department professor Marjorie Garber. The apparent problem, according to the New Yorker account, was a personality conflict: Phelan’s VES colleagues thought she was "obscene" and "abusive," citing one meeting at which she’d laughingly referred to Harvard administrators as "cocksuckers." The dean didn’t technically fire Phelan, but diminished her power in such a humiliating fashion that Phelan ultimately chose to resign.

So there was a palpable sense of déjà vu in the dean’s decision to move the HFA to the Fine Arts Library. "It’s a very disturbing trend," says Guzzetti. "I don’t see why putting a unit under the control of another unit and moving it administratively from one supervisor to another supervisor — what difference does that make?"

The Harvard administration won’t elaborate on the circumstances of Jenkins’s departure after the restructuring — Robert Mitchell, spokesman for Dean Kirby, says simply, "[Bruce] has decided that he will leave" — and Jenkins hasn’t responded to interview requests. But according to one HFA employee, as Jenkins headed to Kirby’s office to discover that he’d been stripped of his authority, a memo from the dean with news of the departmental transfer suddenly materialized in appropriate mailboxes.

BRUCE JENKINS came to Harvard in 1999 from the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, to replace HFA founding curator Vlada Petric, who retired in 1995 after serving more than 15 years in the position. In the years that the job had remained open, sundry film scholars across the country had been offered the position, but none accepted it — most questioned Harvard’s commitment to its film program. Says Ted Perry, a Middlebury College film professor who serves on Harvard’s advisory board: "I think people in the field who’ve actually interviewed think that Harvard would never put the resources behind the job."

The University of Chicago’s Thomas Gunning declined an offer to replace Petric because he thought Harvard didn’t comprehend the nature of the HFA’s curatorial position. "Originally, it was clear to me they didn’t understand what a big job it was," he says. "They wanted me to be a full-time teacher and a full-time curator, and I said even though I liked the idea of combining the two, being a curator of a film archive is an enormous job, and you have to talk to archivists and figure out what is involved. There was a clear lack of understanding of that."

While the search for Petric’s replacement continued, John Gianvito, who’d been teaching film production at UMass Boston, stepped in for a term, followed by Suffolk University professor and Boston Phoenix contributor Gerald Peary. When it finally came time to choose a new curator, though, the committee picked Jenkins, citing his experience with fundraising as the reason for his hiring.

But once Jenkins was aboard, many who worked closely with him say his purported fundraising strengths never came to fruition; rather, he increased the HFA’s spending and ultimately ran up a substantial deficit. For example, imported films are costly — with rental, customs, and shipping fees adding up — so the HFA’s strategy had long been to screen them multiple times in order to make back the money. But Jenkins often would limit rare imported films to one showing — which almost guaranteed a loss for the HFA.

Even the HFA’s bimonthly calendar, usually produced in-house by the staff, was overhauled when Jenkins came onboard. Says John Gianvito, who worked alongside Jenkins for three years, "When Bruce took over, he wanted a different look to the calendar. He hired an outside designer, which cost more money, and went for a more expensive paper stock. I know a calendar isn’t a big thing, but it’s emblematic of the increased spending."

In an e-mailed memo that Martinez circulated to HFA staff members after she became their boss earlier this year, she wrote, "The move of HFA into the Harvard College Library is a restructuring, requested by the Dean, to address administrative and service issues, primarily fiscal management, intellectual access to the collection, and research services" — acknowledging fiscal issues as an incentive for the reassignment.

But others in the academic community say that budgetary problems are often bandied about as an excuse for lack of commitment to a department. "Knowing institutions, that’s often a cover-up," says Middlebury’s Ted Perry. "No one at Harvard goes to the Classics Department and says, ‘Gee, you don’t have very many majors, let’s take away your resources.’ So it’s usually not just money, it’s how the institution regards the entity." He adds, "Without classics, you can’t be a Harvard. But maybe they think you can still be a Harvard without a Harvard Film Archive."

Even in the HFA’s early days, the top members of the Harvard administration never came to screenings unless a big star was presenting a film. "There was definitely a lack of support with VES," says former HFA archive manager Katie Trainor, now a professional film preservationist at the Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Pennsylvania, who also works as the Sundance Film Festival’s only female projectionist. "I never got the sense that they really cared about the HFA like they do about their law school or their business school — probably because the artists don’t become doctors and donate lots of money."

"The suddenness of [the transfer] speaks for itself," says long-time HFA projectionist Steve Livernash. "It wasn’t broadly deliberated. And undeniably, it’s a vote of no confidence in at least some aspect of the operation. Whether the loss of confidence is in Bruce’s leadership, or whether it’s more fundamentally in the whole department, isn’t clear."

"It was always that the chairman and the director of the Carpenter Center was always one of the VES professors," says former HFA curator Petric. "Garber, she came from the comparative-literature program. And now, it’s even worse: film is in the library! At other universities, it’s either under the fine-arts department or communications — never under the library. I think they don’t understand anything. They have to put me in for dean of arts!"

THE OFFICIAL word from Harvard is that despite the departmental shift, very little will change at the HFA. There will be no additional jobs lost, no move from the Carpenter Center, no plans to turn the HFA into an audiovisual collection. Beth Brainard, director of communications for Harvard College Library, confirms that there will be a new curator hired to oversee the HFA, but says the search for Jenkins’s replacement hasn’t started. And according to Martinez’s memo, the cinematheque’s doors will remain open to the public — for now.

But it wouldn’t be that far-fetched to imagine the HFA becoming a resource available solely to the Harvard community. And even if it does stay open to the public, pressure from the university to remain financially solvent could make the HFA’s programming more dependent on ticket sales — which could theoretically curtail the organization’s programming freedom.

Both Perry and Gunning have since heard back from Kirby regarding their complaints. Perry won’t discuss his correspondence; Gunning says, "The dean assures me that he’s got the message." Nevertheless, he’s chary for now. "I’ll be concerned until the new hire is made."

Even Brainard admits that no one really knows what the future holds for the HFA. "All these things that everybody’s anxious about, that have people hanging on tenterhooks, won’t be decided until there’s a new curator. Everyone’s waiting for these decisions to be made and they’re not going to be quick coming."

Whatever happens, Harvard hasn’t gained any fans over the decision to move the HFA. During The Weather Underground screening, when the documentary inventories the group’s attacks, one particular bombing bull’s-eye rouses a particularly giddy round of handclaps. The target? Harvard University.

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com