The Harvard Film Archive (HFA) is a film archive devoted to cinema

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 located in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts is the only building actually built by Le Corbusier in the United States, and one of only two in the Americas...

 at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

. It maintains a collection of over 9000 films and related documents, and regularly screens films in its 210 seat theater. It also maintains a film conservation center near Central Square, Cambridge.

History

The archive was founded in 1979 by Robert Gardner and his colleagues in Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, with grants from the Henry Luce Foundation

Henry Luce

Henry Robinson Luce was an influential American publisher. He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans...

 and the National Endowment for the Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

. It opened on March 16, 1979 with a screening of Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...

’s silent film, Lady Windermere's Fan.

The archive's first curator was Vlada K. Petric, who expanded the collection and established the year-round regular screenings. He retired in 1995 and in 1999 Bruce Jenkins assumed the post.

In January 2005, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences is the largest of the seven faculties that constitute Harvard University.Headquartered principally in Cambridge, Massachusetts and centered in the historic Harvard Yard, FAS is the only division of the university responsible for both undergraduate and...

 dean William C. Kirby

William C. Kirby

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University, where is he concurrently the Director of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund. He is the former Dean of the Harvard...

 announced that the archive would be absorbed by the Harvard College Library and managed by the Library of Fine Arts. This caused some concern within the Harvard community about the future of the archive and its programming. Jenkins resigned soon after the announcement.

In September 2006 film scholar Haden Guest became the new director of the archive. He has calmed fears that the archives' absorption in the Library would affect its public film screenings.

The collection

The fim's collection spans the history of film-making from the silent film

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 era to today, and includes Hollywood films

Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

, documentaries

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

, short films

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

, B-movie

B-movie

A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

s and feature films from all over the world

World cinema

World cinema is a term used primarily in English language speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries. It is therefore often used interchangeably with the term foreign film...

. It is the largest collection of 35mm film in New England.
The collection grows by an average of 15 to 20 films a year and contains some rarities, such as some of the only prints in the United States of several films by Serbian

Serbs

The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...

 director Dusan Makavejev

Dušan Makavejev

Dušan Makavejev is a Serbian film director and screenwriter, famous for his groundbreaking films of Yugoslav cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

.
It also features a large collection of German cinema and the Bavarian Film Fund donates prints of any films that it finances.

Film conservation

It is part of the archive's mission to screen films, however, since film is perishable, regular showings take their toll on the film stock itself. Therefore, conserving and preserving

Film preservation

thumb|300px|Stacked containers filled with reels of [[film stock]]The film preservation, or film restoration, movement is an ongoing project among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images which they contain...

 the collection's prints has also become an important focus. Some films are transferred to new prints or more durable media such as DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

s at the archive's conservation center.

External links

• The Harvard Film Archive's website