Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive and Senior Lecturer in Art, Film and Visual Studies, developed his passion for film history and archival work while studying 19th century photography early in his career at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, where he found himself being increasingly drawn to that institution's renowned motion picture collection and the work of film preservation and curation. “I would religiously attend screenings at their beautiful theater,” Haden recalls. “At the time, film archiving had not yet been  professionalized and there were no degree programs for that career.” But luckily, Haden had the opportunity to take one of the earliest film preservation classes for an experimental version of what would later become the Selznick School of Film Preservation. 

This led Haden to Mexico City, where he completed internships at the two main archives there: the Filmoteca de la UNAM and the Cineteca Nacional. Upon his return, Haden completed his PhD from UCLA and then became the acting Director of the Warner Bros Archives, which houses the largest collection of papers from a single motion picture production company, covering everything from the company’s beginnings to 1967. While at USC, he was invited to apply for the position at Harvard Film Archive, and it was ultimately the perfect fit. 

Since he first began as an archivist, Haden has observed that the career is becoming more professionalised, with schools of study on the subject. However, those who study the work don’t always have the context for the work. “We have professional archivists,” Haden notes, “but they may not actually have the scope of knowledge or have spent considerable time studying the actual thing they’re archiving. So, it’s a very different relationship to the materials. In other countries, like in Japan, where they don’t have a film archive program, at the National Film Archive of Japan, the majority of people working there are actually critics, scholars, and historians.” Because of this, Haden’s background as both an archivist and a historian is more unique in the United States, and that allows him to succeed as the Harvard Film Archive’s Director—because like Haden, the collection is also unique.

“It’s a fully curated collection,” Haden explains. “So, it’s a collection where, unlike some others, every film has been chosen with intention… Different archives have different missions. For example, a national film archive’s mission is typically to preserve national film heritage. So, if it’s the Portuguese Cinematheque, their focus is on Portuguese films. The same is true for Japan, Spain, Sweden, and other countries.” Or, for example, other archives in the U.S. that accept more broad categories of work. “Some archives, like UCLA, have received large donations of films from studios,” Haden says. “For example, MGM donated prints they were planning to discard, and UCLA rescued them. That’s incredibly important work, but it’s not how we operate.”

Harvard’s archive doesn’t follow any sort of mandates and requirements to accept films. “Of course, if there’s a film that’s particularly relevant to Harvard, that’s on our radar.” Haden elaborates. “But we don’t exclusively collect films made at Harvard or by alumni. Our mission is to build a teaching collection designed to support teaching, learning, and research at Harvard…. Every film in the archive was chosen for a reason. There’s been a decision-making process for each one. We have a fantastic film vault, but it’s limited in size. So, we have to be selective about what we accept.” 

The Harvard Film Archive’s collection encompasses a remarkably broad range of historic cinema. It includes films dating from the earliest years of cinema in the 1890s up to the present day, and what truly sets it apart is that it’s a collection of actual film prints. “It’s a film archive in the truest sense,” Haden smiles, “with 35mm and 16mm films remaining our main focus.” And viewers are able to benefit from these films, because the HFA has a cinematheque program where they screen films almost daily year-round, usually with visiting filmmakers presenting their work that is then included in the collection. 

Despite such successful program curation and restoration work, there are still challenges facing both the HFA and the larger film community. “We really are dedicated to the film,” Haden states, “[but] it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that work.” Across the globe, there are fewer photochemical labs that can process films needing to be restored. Technology is changing and evolving. Archiving is a specialized knowledge that isn’t being passed down. Students are more interested in working with digital collections, because there are more opportunities to work in that medium. 

And at Harvard specifically, the HFA team is very limited by the number of hours in the day. “Our collection is larger than the Museum of Modern Art,” Haden says, “but our staff is less than half the size of them. So, we aren't able to do as much preservation work as we'd like to… There are not enough hours in the day to do the work that we have to do, and some of it is quite urgent in terms of the care of collections.” 

However, despite challenges both within Harvard and worldwide, Haden notes there is a great wave of revivalism going through the film industry at the moment. “We're seeing across the country more venues that are screening film… We're in an interesting moment right now where I'm feeling personally more optimistic than I have in a long time in terms of the longevity of analog film,” Haden says. “And why is that important? It's important not for nostalgia's sake. It's important because it's a specific medium with specific qualities, qualities of light, of image, that just can't be replicated. Such extraordinary works of art have been made on film. We could even say made by film. It's a dialogue between the artist and the medium itself. If we were to lose that, we would lose something.”

This is where Haden’s passion and dedication to the craft spring from. “I'm going to be as active as possible in seeking to preserve as much as we can, to screen as much as we can,” He explains. “You can learn from film like you can from no other medium… I personally have learned so much about human experience, about the world, about culture, about language… Film can inspire, especially young minds, like nothing else. I love teaching film. I love that experience of students saying, ‘I've never seen anything like that in my life.’ Those are the words I love hearing.”

A love of film begets great filmmaking, according to Haden. He names recent Harvard filmmakers who embody this ideal. Damien Chazelle AB '07/'08, for example, “says openly that [the Harvard Film Archive’s work] was a formative experience for him,” Haden smiles. “Daniel Goldhaber AB '13 is another younger filmmaker who was a student of mine and would come almost obsessively to the HFA.”

Haden continues, “I really think that the great filmmakers are great film lovers. Truly, I think that's what distinguishes them. I've never met a great filmmaker who doesn't have opinions and thoughts about film, someone who doesn't go regularly to watch film. I really haven't. Filmmakers who are learning realize that the idea is not to invent a language, you don't invent every word, but you invent a way of speaking, of articulating, of shaping, of structuring a sentence. It's the same thing with film. You need to learn that language first… And you do that, I think, by watching films.”

When asked what his favorite film was, Haden laughed. “It changes,” He says. But currently, the film that holds the top spot is Nicholas Ray's THE LUSTY MEN (1952), a beautifully acted and directed drama blending fiction and documentary elements to explore the tensions between an aging rodeo cowboy, his protégé, and the protégé's wife. In a similar vein, a film that Haden believes everyone interested in the industry should see (besides THE LUSTY MEN), of course, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). The HFA screened it recently, and Haden describes, “the film is prophetic in how it speaks about artificial intelligence… I was really dumbfounded by that film. I feel like it's a cautionary tale. It would be great for that to be re-released in theaters…It's stunning. So arresting visually, emotionally, the use of the music. The range of emotions the film contains, I found, you reach this sublimity, and then at the same time despair. It's fear, loneliness, and the question about, ‘What is our relationship to the universe?’”

Other recent projects, besides the thought-provoking re-screening of 2001, that Haden is most excited about include the restoration of I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE (1980), a collaboration between James Baldwin and British documentarian Dick Fontaine. The work chronicles Baldwin's return to the American South to reflect on the civil rights movement. Haden is also leading a major collaboration with Japan's Shochiku Studios to create 35mm prints of 50 classic films, including works by Yasujirō Ozu to establish Harvard as a premier center for Japanese cinema outside Japan.

In 2025, Haden is looking forward to an excess of exciting and groundbreaking programming at the archive. As part of the Shochiku collaboration, the HFA will be hosting a complete retrospective of the films of Mikio Naruse. Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra will be visiting the HFA and classes on campus in April. Haden will also travel to Taipei to receive the papers of the great Taiwanese filmmaker, Edward Yang, among many other upcoming initiatives and screenings planned for this year. 

Haden’s advice for those interested in the crucial work of film preservation is to have a passion for film, and truly be dedicated to the art, because it’s a vocation. But it’s also important to be “something of a generalist,” Haden notes. “You need to be curious and open minded…you're constantly going to encounter things that you know absolutely nothing about. That's humbling. It's also really exciting, because you learn new things, but then you have to be willing to recognize that you can't know everything.”