Fairbanks Hall As It Is Today

In the picture above, the left half of the building shown was added some time after I graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966. To see the Fairbanks Hall that I knew and loved, put your hand over the left half of the picture.

When I was a freshman at Dartmouth, I paid a visit to Fairbanks Hall in its old location just north of Baker Library. I heard that Dartmouth Films, which occupied the building, was showing free films. One day, I wondered into the small auditorium and saw Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 masterpiece Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) about witchcraft in the 17th century. The Danish film electrified me. I had seen a handful of foreign films back in Cleveland, but nothing this good.

That year, the Hopkins Center for the Arts had its grand opening, and the Dartmouth Film Society was able to screen films in the center’s large and fancy auditorium. At the time, I was planning on being an English major; but suddenly new possibilities opened up. The Film Society inaugurated the Hopkins Center auditorium with the world premier of John Huston’s Freud.

In my sophomore year, the college lifted Fairbanks Hall from its north campus location and plunked it down in the middle of the parking lot between Massachusetts Hall and the Hanover, New Hampshire cemetery. I started hanging out there, having long conversations with Blair Watson, who headed up Dartmouth Films, and David Stewart Hull, his assistant.

By my junior year, I was an active member of the Dartmouth Film Society; and the next year, I was its assistant director. By that time, my pituitary tumor was causing intense pain, usually in the form of frontal headaches which started just before noon and (for some reason) ended around midnight. In between those hours, I figured I could screen films for myself on the 16mm projector. I dropped in daily to see what films had been received for screening in classes around campus and threaded the projector if any of them looked interesting. There was a small screening booth I could use for the purpose.

Among the highlights of the films I saw that year were the Frank Capra Why We Fight films made to show Americans why we were fighting in the Second World War; Nelly Kaplan’s great documentary about the films of Abel Gance; René Clair’s French musicals Sous les toits de Paris and Le million; and a whole host of other highly miscellaneous films.

While in Fairbanks, I usually ran into my friend Peter, who was busy editing one of the films he had shot. Today, he lives some twenty-five miles south of me.

Fairbanks Hall had a major influence on my choice of graduate school. I had received a citation for excellence in a class on film history; and I decided to apply to the UCLA film school for an advanced degree in motion picture history and criticism.