Camera Obscura: Behind the Scenes at the VES Film Track

There’s something undeniably mysterious about the VES Department’s film track here at Harvard. Yes, students know that the well-known acronym stands for Visual and Environmental Studies and that it probably isn’t the place to go if your primary academic interests fall within the realms of entomology or environmental sustainability.

A quick visit to the department’s stylish website doesn’t necessarily clear up the confusion surrounding the department. You’ll find a faculty directory brimming with lauded and award-winning artists and professors. You’ll see that its concentration tracks include areas like studio film and film studies, with objectives like exploring the history and theory of abstract concepts such as “the moving image” and “the built environment.” But it’s likely that you’ll find yourself still wondering about what exactly the VES Department offers.

Take a look at 10 different theses from the department’s film track and you might just get 10 different answers. You’ll be just as likely to come across crass, purposefully obnoxious parodies of reality TV kitsch as you will be to find subtle, thoughtful documentaries about social injustices in little-known places. The scope and range of student projects produced each year speaks to uniqueness of the program.

One might assume that students in the VES film track hold high aspirations for distinguished careers in the film industry, and for good reason. However, by heavily emphasizing creativity over vocational training, the department differs even from film programs offered by other liberal arts institutions. Though such a structure runs the risk of alienating some interested in pursuing film on campus, the VES Department’s film track gets overwhelmingly high marks from students both within and without.

A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

Not to be confused with conservatory-style film programs such as those boasted by NYU’s Tisch School and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Harvard’s undergraduate VES film track has a distinct liberal arts slant. According to Robb Moss, the department’s chair and a professor in film and film studies, the emphasis on liberal arts education is something that the VES faculty values tremendously, one that uniquely shapes the filmmaking experience here at Harvard. “We think about filmmaking here in a somewhat different way. We aren’t exactly a film school; we aren’t an art school; yet we do art; we do film. We are a small liberal arts program,” he said in a phone interview.

Moss explains that much of the difference between liberal arts programs and art school programs is a result of opposing pedagogical styles. “We aren’t working backwards from getting people employment in the ways that a film school does,” he said. “Film schools tend to be organized, and rightly so, around the industrial model of filmmaking broken into its constituent parts. There are courses in cinematography or editing or directing actors, or all the pieces that go into film production.”

At Harvard, Moss said, professors and department staff are more interested in the development of students as artists than they are as craftsmen. "We value [those] crafts, they are certainly important, but they are important in the service of students’ authorial voice. The courses that we teach are more organized around students authoring their own work and having the tools to be expressive about their ideas,” he said.

Alfred Guzzetti, a professor of visual arts in the VES Department, agrees with Moss. In professional training programs, he said, “Three-fourths of time is devoted to the learning of film techniques, and the remaining fourth is set aside for the liberal arts education, such as literature and history.” This, he holds, places an emphasis on teaching students the more explicitly practical aspects of filmmaking through classes such as cinematography and directing, while inherently deemphasizing non craft-oriented studies.

INSIDE THE ART HOUSE

In addition to opportunities to experiment with form, the liberal arts focus of Harvard’s film track allows students the opportunity to make films that span academic disciplines. In the Fall of 2010, Guzzetti collaborated with Music professor Hans Tutschku to offer a course entitled “Electro-acoustic Music and Video in Dialogue.” (VES 157t) The class brought together student filmmakers and student composers with the goal of promoting mutual teaching and learning through the creation of audio-visual projects.

Guzzetti recalls a particularly interesting assignment in which student filmmaker/composer teams were given two projectors, two screens, and four channels of sound, and instructed to make a one-minute long piece in which the imagery and the sound were derived from water. The pairs were made to do the project twice: once with the student composer creating the music and the student filmmaker creating the video, and later with the composer producing the video and the filmmaker the music. Guzzetti credits Harvard’s expansive resources with the ability to undertake such unique and exciting endeavors. “It was a very situation-dependent course. It just so happens that Harvard has an electronic music studio, and it also happens that at Harvard it’s very easy for faculty members to do collaborations,” he said.

For concentrators in the film track, access to varying academic possibilities directly correlates to more creative outlets. Max R. McGillivray ’16, who focuses on film in VES, states that the abundance of creative possibility attracted him to the program. He made his decision to come to Harvard after visiting the VES Department his senior year of high school. He, too, praises the department’s emphasis on the unique ways that the program got its students to think. “I think it’s a great aspect because it gets you out of the way of thinking of filmmakers from other schools,” he said. “I think that’s a very freeing part of the program. You’re not making the same films as everyone else.”

The Visual and Environmental Studies Department's film track emphasizes creativity over vocational training. By Rohan W. Goel

Such artistic idiosyncrasy by way of broad academic exposure is something that Moss attributes to the flexibility of the program. “Generally people aren’t told they can’t do something—students are exposed to different kinds of filmmaking, so they try different things,” he said, recognizing the richness and distinctiveness of student work and applauding their willingness to take risks. “I think there’s a tremendous urge to make things that are like Hollywood or the television shows that you love,” he said of young filmmakers. “You go to the movies as a child, and it’s completely natural to want to make something like that.”

He asserted, though, that filmmakers considering the VES film track need not disavow themselves of their interests in creating more traditional or less experimental projects. “[They] have plenty of opportunity to make something like that going forward, as a graduate student or as a career,” he said. “We think that it’s important to give students the opportunity to do something that isn’t an interpretation of something else. To find out what is inside them, what interests them, what kinds of form that takes.”

AUTEURIAL AUTONOMY

According to VES film concentrator Alistair A. Debling ’16, the artistic freedom that comes with the liberal arts education is one of the principal strengths of the program. "It’s chiefly about being an artist,” he said. “We’re given the freedom to follow our own interests and organize our own learning, be in charge of our own projects."

The result of such autonomy is a remarkably diverse collection of student art produced by VES students each year. It also enables a certain experimental aesthetic, one that casual moviegoers don’t get too much exposure to in the high-budget Hollywood films that dominate mass-market theaters. Debling maintains that in exploring their own interests, VES students learn to challenge industry conventions by “breaking established rules of cinema such as the three-act structure that most all Hollywood films fall into and finding ways of defying strict set of narrative rules.”

This deconstructive artistic act isn’t just edifying for the artist, Debling said, but results in novel and interesting ways of engaging the viewer. For example, he said that a VES class he’s currently enrolled in attempts to probe the space between the alive and the performed, resulting in installation films that “more resemble art that you might see in a gallery as opposed to in a cinema.”

In the hopes of developing their artistic identities, individual students in the VES film track often form what resembles a self-contained mini-production team. They write, shoot, direct, and edit their own material. Moss sees this personal creative process as fundamental to the development of able and distinctive filmmakers. He likens it to the process to of writing—just as authors develop their skills to better understand and translate the world around them through prose, filmmakers develop their own methods to interrogate the world through their various types of work.

ZOOMING OUT

For students outside the concentration, the creative aspect is what attracts them to the department as well. One such student is Zachary L. Wong ’16, who is currently concentrating in English. Though he’s been interested in animation since high school, when it was time to select a college, Wong said the choice represented a major decision in how he would pursue his dream. “I wanted to have a college experience that would allow me to experience life as an artist,” Wong said. “A big component of filmmaking requires you to reflect on life experiences. So, I felt that if I went into a conservatory-type program, I would be going into the field with the life experiences of a high schooler. I thought that it might be more interesting if I just went to school, studied something unrelated, and see where that took me.”

For that reason, Wong declined offers of admissions to film schools and also decided against the film track of the VES concentration here at Harvard. “I figured, I turned down conservatory, so it doesn’t really make sense for me to go to Harvard and kind of take a conservatory path program.”

However, Wong does admit that there are downsides to his decision and is currently considering a secondary in VES. "I miss being a part of a creative environment. I haven’t done a lot of creative work, so now [my motivation] is a feeling of restlessness,” he said." Wong’s decision to take part in VES programs through a secondary or individual classes seems to be a popular one. Even though the size of the film track of the VES department is small, Moss notes the abundance of students outside of the concentration taking VES film classes, adding those classes are practically “bursting at the seams.”

Eric Rentschler, chair of the graduate Film and Visual Studies Program, runs a Harvard Summer School program in conjunction with the Berlin Film Academy Germany that is aimed at providing students like Wong, or students who are less vocationally interested in the art of filmmaking, with a creative outlet. For eight weeks, students in the program take classes, learn about the city, and work on their final project, the artistic culmination of their stay. Like the professors of the VES Department, Rentschler stresses an emphasis on personal artistic realization over learning vocational skills. “By and large, students were curious about the city and getting to know the city and letting the endeavor of making a film be something that helped them focus their stay,” he said in a phone interview. The purpose of the program’s final project was to encapsulate and bring to a head the experience that students had during their time in Berlin in a personal way. “There’s a value in that that is above and beyond pragmatics,” Rentschler said.

FINAL CUT

The VES film track’s approach to filmmaking, though distinctly in line with the goals of the liberal arts education, seems to not be necessarily the best fit for all students. Though anthropology concentrator Temi Fagbenle ’15 said that while she was intrigued by the non-vocational emphasis of the department, as an aspiring actor, she’s more interested in honing her craft through theater classes. “Delving into the performance is what I wanted to do,” she explains. “I was interested in the work being done on the other side of the camera in terms of the creation of the performance, but acting is my chief interest.”

For students like Fagbenle who are more certain of their career aspirations in filmmaking, the VES Department’s lack of focus on teaching those specific crafts isn’t optimal. At the same time, the majority of filmmakers on campus seem to be attracted to VES precisely for the experimental structure. McGillivray lauds, “I personally love that it’s called ‘Visual and Environmental Studies’ because I think that sums up very well the visual objective of the department as well as the environmental—absorbing and conceptualizing the world around us.” It seems that the VES Department, by offering freedom with experimentation and individuality, grants its students a way to look at the world, rather than just skills and training.

—Staff writer Caleb M. Lewis can be reached at clewis01@college.harvard.edu