VES Will No Longer Run Film Archive

Students registering today for film studies courses in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) and elsewhere may be looking forward to a semester of movies while their peers slave away in Lamont or Widener.

But in a move announced last week and effective last Sunday, the management of the Harvard Film Archive (HFA)—a resource that film scholars in Harvard’s undergraduate, graduate and faculty communities say is essential to their studies—has been transferred from VES to the Harvard College Library (HCL) system. The shift has left Bruce Jenkins out of his job as the archive’s curator.

University spokesperson Robert P. Mitchell said Katharine Martinez, the Suit librarian of the Fine Arts Library, is now in charge of the archive’s staff and vast collection of prints and videos. Since arriving at Harvard in 1999, Jenkins, a senior lecturer in VES, has run the archive and reported to the VES chair.

Jenkins did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

According to a letter written by Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby last Monday, the archive’s employees, now reporting to Martinez, will keep their offices in the basement of the Carpenter Center, and the archive will continue its regular screenings in the two auditoriums located there.

“There are no big huge changes that are going to happen,” said HCL spokesperson Beth Brainard.

HCL has recently had to lay off 10 employees and cut back on journal subscriptions to counter a projected $2.3 million budget shortfall. Brainard said these financial issues will not affect the archive’s continued functioning with its new administration.

“[HFA has] a line in the dean’s budget and that line will move to the library,” she said.

Ned Hinkle, director of the Brattle Theatre, said the archive had long faced fiscal challenges of its own.

“Doing programming like the HFA...is costly and time-consuming,” said Ned Hinkle, director of the Brattle Theatre. “It’s a constant financial struggle.”

Brainard said Martinez and HFA staff had already begun meeting to assess what changes, if any, need to be made to the archive.

Kirby’s letter cited the library’s “critical skills and services” as reasons for the shift.

“In particular, tasks such as cataloguing, preservation, and acquisition are best done within a library setting,” Kirby wrote.

But filmmaker Alfred Guzzetti, Hooker professor of the visual arts, wondered whether the library administration was suited to carry out the wide range of services currently provided by the HFA.

“The functions that are like a film museum, a cinematheque, the exhibition of films and sponsoring visiting artists...it’s unknown,” he said. “Clearly that’s not the kind of thing that a library regularly does.”

Kirkland House Master Tom C. Conley, a professor of Romance languages and literatures who teaches courses on film, stressed the unique quirks of maintaining a film archive.

“These are important films that are in there, and they have to be preserved, cared for,” he said. “I think you need someone who is a professional archivist.”

Conley praised Jenkins’ tenure as curator, saying he had been a major help to those teaching and studying film at Harvard.

“When I was doing research on hard-to-find films, he pulled 35 mm films right out of the archive and showed them just for me,” Conley said. “There’s been this sort of generosity and collegiality.”

Mitchell said there was a “huge interest in film studies” among students and faculty, which led to the approval last month of an undergraduate concentration track in the field within VES, to be introduced this fall.

He said that the archive’s contents will be added for the first time to Hollis, the University Library’s online catalog.

“It will allow broader use of the archive,” Mitchell said.

And Guzzetti said it still remains to be seen whether the archive will work under its new management.

“This is completely disruptive,” he said. “That kind of change creates tremendous uncertainty...in all quarters.”

He added it might be as many as five years before “everyone knows whether the character of the archives will change.”

“It isn’t just a question that’s going to be answered in the next few months,” he said.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached vozick@fas.harvard.edu.