Large Gift Boosts Film Archive’s Collection

Harvard’s once small collection of film stills—movie frames studied by film historians—is slowly ballooning into one of the country’s ten largest, thanks to a gift from a pair of German collectors.

Munich-based couple Lothar and Eva Just are now in the process of donating their estimated 800,000-piece collection to the Harvard Film Archive. So far, the HFA has received over 42,600 items in the collection, which will take an estimated five years to arrive and catalog, according to Film Conservator Elizabeth Coffey. The HFA began receiving the shipments in May 2008.

The materials—which according to Coffey include film stills, negatives, pressbooks, posters, slides and transparencies, and text documents—span all the way back into silent films and include international movies.

Notably, the collection includes shots from films whose footage has been partially or wholly destroyed—such as Josef von Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

The film collection is immense; “it took over [the Justs’] whole townhouse—except for the kitchen and bathroom,” said HFA Director Haden Guest. “That kind of collection is only put together with great passion and patience.”

The pieces in the Just collection were originally indexed by filmmaker and subdivided into films, Guest said, and the HFA has decided to keep that system.

The gift continues more than a decade of Lothar Just’s philanthropic relationship with Harvard, who began working with Germanic Languages and Literature Professor Eric Rentschler in the 1990s to help obtain several hundred 35-millimeter German feature films for Harvard’s collection from the Film and Television Board of Bavaria in cooperation with German directors and producers.

Just approached Rentschler around 2005 to offer donating his film collection, Rentschler said.

“This is going to be seen by film historians as an enormous help,” Rentschler said. “At a time when Harvard is building a Ph.D. program in film studies, this collection will be tremendously helpful for people writing their dissertations.”

Coffey, the Harvard archive’s film conservator, said she now oversees a team of several students who are working part-time to catalog the pieces.

The HFA is considering making the stills available online at some point in the future, but with years of cataloging before the collection is even assembled in the physical archive, Coffey said researchers or curious film-buffs will have to trek to the Fine Arts Library for their fix for some time to come.