Garber says that before this year, VES committed itself with Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby to adding two positions in film studies. Connor, as a joint hire, counted as one-half of a position; another joint hire in film studies this term—Assistant Professor Despina Kakoudaki, appointed to VES and the comparative literature department, who is on leave until next fall—was a second half-position.

That left one more open spot in film studies, which Rentschler says VES hopes to fill with a full senior professor by the end of the academic year. He says that the search process for that third hire is ongoing, with the department having whittled the possibilities down to a short list.

With these new appointments and the department poised to create an undergraduate concentration in the field, Rentschler is convinced that film studies’ position at the margins of Harvard is a thing of the past.

When he arrived at Harvard in 1998, he says, the major project at the time was collating the College’s existing offerings in film studies into a brochure for students—in part to demonstrate to administrators that starting a formal film studies program would not require major course additions. This strategy is still at the forefront of the push for a concentration track.

“One of the ways that faculty are persuaded of things is to show that it already exists and needs to be formalized,” Garber says.

The first edition of the brochure came out in fall 2000, Rentschler says, to apparent success.

“From the time I was here, I’ve seen only green lights,” he says, adding that he has received “nothing but support from University Hall.”

Bruce Jenkins, Cavell curator of the Harvard Film Archive (HFA), says that Kirby is “a little more traveled in this area” than his predecessors, citing the dean’s knowledge of Chinese cinema.

And after so many years of being dispersed throughout FAS, film studies has been left in an oddly auspicious position at Harvard: with the critical resources of a formal film studies program and none of its lingering strictures and bureaucratic baggage.

“We’re freed from the past in a way,” says Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking Robb Moss. “It’s precisely because it hasn’t happened here in this organized way that gives us the chance to do something special.”

Long Time on the Story Board

Longtime observers say a unique set of circumstances, intimately tied to the complicated development of VES, have conspired to make film studies what Connor calls “the last art to hop into the Arts and Sciences.”

“The tradition we have is at variance with the institutional standing that film studies have here,” Rentschler says.

Philosophical concerns both within and without the department are at the root of this historic resistance.

Several professors note that the academic theory of cinema was essentially founded by Hugo Munsterberg—a Harvard professor of psychology—shortly before his death in 1916.