Now Playing...Film Studies

Last spring, the Educational Policy Committee approved a film studies stream within Visual and Environmental Studies (VES). A number of departments have made new film faculty appointments, VES has painstakingly assembled an internationally renowned film studies faculty who love to teach and course offerings are at an all-time high.

Harvard’s latest curricular innovation caught it up with the rest of the Ivies (leaving only Princeton in our curricular dust) and 17 other national universities in the top 20 of the U.S. News survey. The meaning is clear: Big-time universities think that film studies is something you ought to be able to major in and Harvard finally agrees.

So should you?

There are half a dozen good reasons to choose film studies as a concentration (pre-professional planning, a desire to grapple with certain artworks that you find inescapably important), and some not so good ones (a C in your orgo class, a desire to épater les ’rents).

One reason that deserves discussion is the usefulness of film studies to one possible, and increasingly prominent justification of liberal education, the need for “globalized” citizens.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby put it this way in his cover letter to the Curricular Review report, “Harvard College has a responsibility to educate its students—who will live and work in all corners of the globe—as citizens not only of their home country, but also of the world.”

As a pillar of liberal education, world citizenship is old news. What has changed is that there is now an assumption that the interplay between national and world citizenship often occurs in insolubly conflictual ways. This wave of globalization has inspired a complicated cultural and institutional resistance to American(-style) economic dominance. We all know this. People used to be surprised by local resistances; no one should be anymore. (Haven’t you seen Braveheart or Gladiator or King Arthur or Troy?)

Here’s where film studies is exemplary. For if there has been an area where American economic (and stylistic) dominance has driven complicated cultural and institutional resistance, it has been in film. Resistance to Hollywood has been national and personal; it’s been aesthetically radical and desperately imitative; but Hollywood has been the elephant in the room since the 1920s.

The world festival circuit and the postwar European art cinema sprang up, in part, to fend off American theatrical dominance. Our film history is incalculably richer for it.

There have also been productive interferences: The French New Wave loved American film noir; Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story takes off from Leo McCarey; Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo morphed into Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More.

The Harvard Film Archive (HFA) preserves and exhibits much of this heritage. It was also an important part of the liberation of Eastern Bloc cultural works and venue for their display. It is still a place where important films with little commercial potential but immense cultural importance are regularly screened. (We also screen plenty of highly commercial films in an effort to examine their appeal.)

Foreign policy debates (import quotas), economics (state funding), sociological and anthropological issues (audience studies), technological and labor histories (digital production; women in the trades)—film provides not analogues, but instances, of all of them. And it enfolds those instances in narratively and aesthetically complex representations of themselves—representations that require sustained theoretical and analytical attention on their own.

Want to know where global commercial culture is going? Go to the movie and visit the websites (and don’t forget the .fr, .jp, or .za versions) and play the video game and shop at a Toys R Us. Want to know how China is dealing with its international image? Look at how the government treats Zhang Yimou. Want proof that film has to be fought for? Look at how Harvey Weinstein treats Zhang Yimou.

So there you go: Concentrating in film studies is an ideal way of becoming a citizen of the world because you never risk forgetting that there are important barriers to your achievement of that citizenship. There is no easy cosmopolitanism. Film studies allows you to discover precisely what the barriers are and exactly how they can be overcome. It challenges you to explore both what happens when the barriers fall away (the HFA’s upcoming visit by Tsai Ming-liang, for example) and what forms of greatness are possible because of them (in, say, the best Hollywood Westerns).

This is a decent (B/B+) reason to concentrate in film studies regardless of whether you plan a career in film or film studies. But it may ultimately be a better reason for “the world” than for you, the citizen, and it may leave out the transformative experiences that drove your educational choices. In any case, it is not the way I would choose a concentration at Harvard.

Start by being fascinated or passionate or inspired about something. If there’s a way to concentrate in it, do the other concentrators strike you as people you most want to learn with and from? If you don’t need these particular peers to learn about it, then why spend so much time with them? Find the people who inspire and provoke you. Learn the other stuff on your own.

With film studies inside VES, and with access to the HFA, I think you have one of the best learning communities imaginable. As a VES concentrator, you would be certain never to stray too far from practice, never to forget the challenges of art and relevance, and always to face the provocation of the new. (You’ll also get good advising.)

There are other great concentrations at Harvard, of course. I was in one (Social Studies) and I’m jointly appointed with another (English). Still other concentrations and faculty members in other departments have earned my gratitude by doing the hard work of teaching film and building the consensus for film studies when it had no proper curricular home. But now it does, and so you are free to choose.

J.D. Connor ’92, a Crimson editor, is an assistant professor of English and VES, and is assistant director of undergraduate studies for Film Studies. He can be reached at 6-6799, at jdconnor@fas.harvard.edu and in Sever 401a; his office hours are Mondays 2-5 p.m. and by appointment. Students interested in concentrating in VES are invited to an introductory meeting on Friday, Sept. 17 at 3 p.m. in Carpenter Center Room B-04.