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Still reeling
Departmental transfers, staff infighting, faculty resignations: Is the future of the Harvard Film Archive — and its lauded public film program — in jeopardy?
BY CAMILLE DODERO


THE PACKED HOUSE hisses at the big screen. It’s the Sunday-night show at the Harvard Film Archive; the object provoking the audience’s scornful sibilance is an unsympathetic FBI agent interviewed in The Weather Underground (2002) — an Academy Award–nominated documentary about a bomb squad of young radicals who vowed to bring the Vietnam War home through violent acts of property destruction. It’s also the first feature in the HFA’s "Activist Cinema," a screening series of progressive works.

Whether it’s the lure of a lefty film or the promise of a post-screening appearance by director Sam Green and Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn, tonight’s event is a magnet for activist types. They jeer at riot-gear-clad law-enforcement officials. They clap when HFA assistant curator Steffen Pierce describes the dissident Weathermen as "determined to overthrow the United States government." One woman flips the bird at Richard Nixon’s onscreen mug. It’s like a Rocky Horror Picture Show for political subversives.

What’s more significant about this particular moment, though, is that the Harvard Film Archive will turn 25 in a little over a week. And while there were a handful of celebrations last fall, one would expect more commemorative events to mark the occasion. But there aren’t any more festivities on the schedule — and the dearth might have something to do with a recent development: the Harvard Film Archive is now part of Harvard’s Fine Arts Library.

Beyond cinephile circles and the Harvard community, such a restructuring might not seem like a big deal. In reality, though, the decision to reassign the HFA from its original academic branch, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) — a clunky umbrella term for what is essentially an arts department — to the Harvard College Library (HCL) was a bombshell. As a direct result, HFA curator Bruce Jenkins tendered his resignation. A veteran VES professor quit a film-studies committee in protest. Worse still, rumors spread about the dubious future of the HFA’s public film program.

Cinema scholars across the country fired off dissenting letters and e-mails to Dean William Kirby, the administrator who’d overseen the reassignment. "I don’t think it’s untoward that the film community be discussing this," says Thomas Gunning, a film scholar at the University of Chicago who sent Kirby a letter of disagreement. "Some people felt, ‘Well, this is a local issue.’ But it’s bigger than that. Our film heritage is at risk, in harm’s way."

Overstated? Perhaps not. These academics fear that handing over the HFA’s 9000 films — many rare, some irreplaceable — to librarians who aren’t skilled in the delicate processes of film preservation could have potentially disastrous cultural implications. "When they restored Vertigo," says Gunning, "possibly the greatest American film ever made — they drew on material from this archive. So it’s not just preserving a collection for Harvard. It’s preserving part of our world heritage."

"When I first got here," now-departed HFA curator Bruce Jenkins told online magazine NewEnglandFilm.com in an interview published in January 2000, "the Boston Globe ran its fall campus previews and under the profile of Harvard, it was noted that Harvard Film Archive is one of the ‘best kept secrets on campus,’ and I remember thinking this is probably not a good thing."

Indeed. Compared to the neon marquees of multiplexes and the billboard-style promotion of Hollywood blockbusters, the HFA does maintain a relatively low profile. Buried in the basement of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, it isn’t the kind of place you spot on the way to somewhere else — it hides below the street level, marked inconspicuously by a red kiosk outside the first-floor Sert Gallery. A screening room for cinephiles who care more about character development and thematic exploration than celebrity actors and formulaic plots, the 210-seat theater shows critically acclaimed classics, avant-garde works, international masterpieces, and silent films — from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963) to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). It also holds important retrospectives of hugely influential filmmakers — the likes of cinematographer Sven Nykvist, German director Werner Herzog, and still photographer/underground filmmaker William Klein. Even better, it presents discussions with respected auteurs, including Punch-Drunk Love writer/director P.T. Anderson, actor/director John Malkovich, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and Swedish actress Bibi Andersson.

"You treasured the calendar," recalls Peter Dowd, who parlayed an HFA curatorial-assistant job and an internship with Cantabrigian documentarian Errol Morris into a position as head of film programming at the renowned George Eastman House, before moving on to the American Museum of the Moving Image. "You almost didn’t need a calendar: you could have faith in the curators and show up blind. You’d always be guaranteed to see something new or revolutionary or beautiful."

"The place spans the entire history of movies," says Orphans of Mathare co-director Randy Bell, a teaching assistant for VES from 2000 to 2002. "Art films by Tarkovsky, Bergman, Bresson, Antonioni, and Altman. It was amazing to have access to all that as a student."

The only area theaters with even the remotest similarity are nonprofits like Harvard Square’s Brattle Theatre and Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre — but even they haven’t enjoyed the same breadth of freedoms as the HFA. "While we wish we could play every movie we absolutely wanted to play," says Ned Hinkle, director at the Brattle, "at some point — I don’t want to say a commercial decision is made — but the number of people who will come and see the film is occasionally a factor for us, whereas that is not necessarily something the HFA has to be concerned with." The HFA is technically a nonprofit organization — which means its financial resources come primarily from ticket sales, organized benefits, and private donors. But unlike the nonprofit Coolidge and Brattle, the HFA is affiliated with an academic institution with deep pockets. Says Hinkle: "They are in a position to take a lot more chances."

A telling example of the HFA’s ability to take chances occurred in the late ’90s, when it debuted Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) — a patchwork of graphic vignettes featuring glue-sniffing, stray-cat-killing white-trash kids and one encephalitic dwarf. Local theaters (including Landmark’s independent-minded Kendall Square Cinema) opted not to run it; the HFA did.

But the HFA is more than just personal appearances, audacious programming, and a resource for Harvard faculty and students — the "Archive" in its name refers to its vaults of celluloid prints. "The Archive has several different functions," explains Alfred Guzzetti, the Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts in the VES Department who’s been actively involved in the HFA since its inception. "One of them is collecting and preserving films, another is supporting the curricula of courses by showing the films that are being studied, and another is to run a cinematheque, which is a public film museum."

Film scholars find fault with the very notion of a cinematheque. Although the word "cinematheque" derives from cinéma and bibliothèque, the French word for "library," a film archive is considered more like a museum than a depository for catalogued reels: display and maintenance of the art are as important as its accessibility and accrual. Even though the Fine Arts Library is affiliated with Harvard’s Fogg Museum, faculty members like Guzzetti, who resigned from the VES’s film-studies board in the wake of the reorganization, think the HFA’s transfer to the library overtly minimizes the importance of public exhibition. As Guzzetti points out, "To suddenly re-categorize the archives as a part of the library seems to be a clear message about which functions they mean to prioritize over the others."

In other words, the public film program seemed like a goner. The HFA has long been one of the ways land-usurping Harvard gives back to the community in return for its enormous tax-free real-estate holdings. But its new home, the Fine Arts Library, is a closed system — available only to the Harvard community and approved faculty members, students, and curatorial staff from other institutions. Shifting the HFA into that department creates the possibility that the HFA’s screening room may close to the public.

In addition, the reassignment demoted the role of the HFA’s curator. Under VES, the curator was an artist regarded for his creative acumen. As part of the library, the HFA’s curator could become something akin to a garden-variety manager.

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Issue Date: March 19 - 25, 2004
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