Artist Profile: Haden Guest on the Harvard Film Archive and Great Cinema

As the current Director of the Harvard Film Archive and Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Haden Guest naturally has a keen interest in film.

Guest’s exploration of film archival work stretches back decades — after spending time in New York’s George Eastman Museum and working as an intern at two of Mexico City’s major film archives, Filmoteca UNAM and the Cineteca Nacional, he was hooked. Film was no longer just an interest, but a vocation to dedicate himself to.

“It was there as an intern [that] I learned about what it means to care for motion picture films, to archive them, to organize them, to make them accessible, and to program them,” Guest said. “UNAM has an amazing film cinematheque program, and that was one of the reasons why, when I realized I wanted to continue to study film, I decided to go to UCLA — because they have an archive as well.”

Now, Guest has an extensive repertoire of global cinema under his academic belt: America, Mexico, Japan, Argentina, and many others. He believes this broader perspective on cinema is necessary to understand and recognize the constant innovation in film.

“True cinema can be found — is found — all over the world,” he said.

While film is a worldwide, enduring industry, there is something fundamentally ephemeral to its art — it is a product of its time and its creator’s vision of the world. Guest believes that it is this very ephemeral quality that makes cinema a powerful historical tool.

“I feel like the great cinemas exist for just a limited period of time. Italy in the ’60s, Japan, also in the post-war period, I think is absolutely incredible. You know, the U.S. cinema of the ’70s, Portuguese cinema of the ’60s,” Guest said, listing on his fingers. “American independent cinema of the ’80s.”

He described what makes these cinematic periods interesting.

“These are moments that [are] finite,” Guest continued. “And they define, kind of, sensibility, and the specific position of film and the relationship to the world around it. And filmmakers in relation to the world around them. So in studying those moments, one can learn a lot about that place, about that time, but also about the ways in which film continues to evolve as an art form.”

Guest also offered his thoughts on the rules and conventions of cinema.

“If you look at mysteries in the ’30s, they’re really interesting conventions — a mixture of comedy and suspense, for instance. That’s a tradition that continues to sort of linger in really interesting ways. So I think there’s a real value in tradition, but there’s also real value in innovation,” he said.

This delicate tension between tradition and innovation is also one that extends to his work as the director of the HFA, one of the largest university-based film collections. Guest presents a possible quandary of archival work: facing a sole print copy of a film that bears heavy damage and deterioration.

“How far do you go into cleaning up that, right? And so this is a similar question to restoration of painting. How far do you go to clean up a painting? Can you go too far? You can, like they did to the Sistine Chapel, where they made it incredibly bright, and there’s a lot of discussion, debate about that,” he said.

These questions around painting restoration, he explained, could be applied to film as well.
“When you digitize a film,” Guest continued, “even if it’s called a digital restoration, you’re altering the film. When you’re digitizing an analog film, it just changes in nature. And so it becomes brighter, and it usually becomes sharper, and so that’s a distortion of the original.”

It’s a balancing act that Guest navigates with his colleagues. The team behind the HFA is relatively small — UCLA, the largest, has a staff “about 10 times larger” than the HFA’s, Guest remarked — but close-knit and passionate.

Guest is able to work on every aspect of film preservation in his role, archiving the physical materials and presenting those films to new audiences through the HFA cinematheque.

The cinematheque hosts regular screenings of curated films every week, Sunday to Monday, and frequently features special groupings of those films in various aptly named series.

Just last semester, the HFA hosted a series dubbed “Psychedelic Cinema” that focused on the many sub-genres within psychedelic film — from acid Westerns to hallucinatory dreamscapes. The series spawned from a conversation between Guest and Michael Pollan, the Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and Professor at Harvard, the latter of whom is very interested in the study of psychedelics.

“In terms of thinking about the programs, there are a number of different strands, let’s say,” Guest said. “There are those that are very like a passion product. Well, first of all, I’m passionate about everything we show — I mean, that’s the main criteria as curator of the cinematheque program. So there are some dream projects that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and we can finally do them.”

Above all else, Guest hopes to bring more students to the HFA. He points to the Student Cinematheque, which he is a faculty advisor of. Through the program, students can directly learn more about the art of film programming, create a weekly film series held in the theater, and get more involved with the Harvard Film Archive.

“I hope students can at least come and experience the HFA at least once during their four years,” Guest said. “The one thing I don’t want to hear is ‘I didn’t know about the archive.’”

—Staff writer Eunice S. Chae can be reached at eunice.chae@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @eschae007.