There was once a time, when taking a class on cinema might have been academically suspect. Richard Peña, a film scholar and Columbia University professor, would know. “It was a little like forbidden fruit,” said Peña, who was in Mumbai earlier this month for a workshop series on Latin American cinema for the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
“People would say, film is just foolishness, it’s just silly; it’s not real art.” He smiles and continues, “I was alive during that time. So I saw and heard people say those things.” Now though, film classes fill up easily. “For the generations at university now, it’s much more part of what they see as culture.”
A melting pot of cinema
At 63, Peña is something of an institution; he has been teaching at Columbia University since 1989, and for 25 years until 2012, he helmed the New York Film Festival (NYFF), an influential annual event that became an arbiter of cinematic trends. Peña is often credited with helping bring wider recognition to filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Lars von Trier and Hou Hsiao-hsien. He has also introduced American audiences to a sumptuous array of global films: from countries such as China and Iran, places that barely registered on anyone’s artistic map in the ’80s.
“My basic goal was that I wasn't going to mess it up,” says Peña talking about the time he first came on board at the festival in 1988. NYFF was doing well, and he respected it. “But perhaps it needed to come a little more into contact with what I considered was going on in world cinema, especially when we were just entering into an age where we had much greater access to all kinds of things.” says the former director of NYFF. “So I wanted to make sure that that was reflected in the programming.” And so, an energetic mission to choose and showcase foreign films began in earnest. Peña has been agnostic in his tastes but evangelical about his championing of non-obvious, non-Hollywood fare. “Cinema offers you a lot,” he says. “And no nation's cinema should suffice, especially when it’s so easy to watch films from other places and to get different sensibilities and different ideas.”
A solitary experience
But even as accessing films from outside the mainstream has become easier — and tastes widened to accommodate more foreignness — there is simultaneously a narrowing of the American mind. “I think things exist in a dialectic,” says Peña of the seeming contradiction. “On the one hand, people have a much broader awareness of international cinema on a certain level. And on the other, I think America has become increasingly closed off to the world as we see.” That's not the only thing Peña rues. Though access has been democratised, something is lost in the U.S. “The traditional way of going to a movie theatre, sitting down in the dark looking at a screen; that model of film consumption has become very limited,” he says. “And I think increasingly [it] will become almost a museum experience.”
Film viewing culture developed on the projection model of the Lumière brothers, rather than the kinetoscope model proposed by Thomas Edison. Edison's peephole-style device allowed one person to watch a film at a time. But that never took off. Yet now, more than ever, people are watching films alone on computer screens, iPhones and televisions. “Edison might be getting the last laugh,” chuckles Peña. But somewhere, something ineffable might be lost and Peña is firmly on team Lumière. “The communal experience of viewing is for me a very important part of cinema,” he said. “But I also don't think you can put your finger in the dyke and hope it holds. It's changed and we’ll just have to see what films are made, how they’re made.”
Sense and censorship
Peña's tastes are dizzyingly diverse; and he counts off a bunch of different films from 2016 that he enjoyed: the German comedy Toni Erdmann , the Oscar-nominated documentaries O.J.: Made in America and I Am Not Your Negro , and Indivisible , an Italian film. There isn't much of a pattern. “I often like films for what’s different about them, how contradictory they can be,” he says. “I can like a very commercial Hollywood director and a director who is extremely esoteric.”
What he definitely does not like are the powers that be that censor and certify films. As a self-described civil libertarian, the pushback against free expression restrictions is a recognisable impulse. Although the Indian censor board can ask for cuts in films, films in the U.S. are simply rated for different audiences. “I think there is a Christian hangover guilt of feeling that people are being corrupted by this,” he concludes, laughing. “I don't believe in any kind of censorship, whatever form it takes is wrong.”
