Richard Peña: A Teacher, A Director, An Essential Figure in Film

Earlier this year, when many Columbia professors were easing
into summer break and its lighter workload, Richard Peña
knew he was just getting started—in fact, he said, “my
absolute busiest time of year is summer.” In addition to
being an associate professor of film in the School of the Arts,
Peña is also the director and selection committee chairman
of the New York Film Festival, which begins its 42nd annual run
tonight. And so, that meant a summer filled to the brim with movie
screenings, as he whittled over 1700 entries down to a select group
of 25 films. Throw in his year-round duties running the Walter
Reade Theater as the program director of the Film Society of
Lincoln Center, and it becomes clear that he is one busy man.
Balancing his time between Columbia and Lincoln Center can get
hectic, he said, but “I love both halves of my working
life.”

Last week, Peña found time to sit down and talk about his
teaching at Columbia and his central role in New York’s film
scene. The festival gets underway tonight, running through October
17th, and from the looks of it, this year’s edition, the 17th
under Peña’s direction, will continue to stay true to
its distinctive goals. With its small size and guiding vision of
film as an art form, the festival has always stressed quality over
quantity and drawn its prestige from making artistic achievement
its criterion for selection.

Though the festival usually ends up including films from around
the world, factors like regional diversity do not come into play
according to Peña: “I think that our audience would
begin to smell it right away.” That integrity is crucial for
him and is also evident in how the festival doesn’t get
caught up in the commercialism and celebrity courting found at
other film festivals. The resulting atmosphere has sometimes been
criticized as aloof and pretentious, but, for many, the festival
remains a discerning showcase of high-quality movies. And history
is on the NYFF’s side: “I don’t think the
reactions to showing a lot of New German Cinema were necessarily
that favorable in the 1970s—I can remember people saying
‘not another Fassbinder film?’ for a long
time—but eventually Fassbinder won out. People came to
realize how important his work was.”

The selection process begins for Peña in February when he
attends the Berlin Film Festival, sees a lot of films, talks to
people about what’s coming up, and starts to make lists of
movies to track. “That’s my job—to be really
informed about all that’s out there,” he says. When he
returns from the Cannes Film Festival in May, “that’s
really the crunch time.” He and the other four selection
committee members watch hundreds of films up until mid-August when
final decisions are made. Then, his “job slows down quite a
bit, there’s a little bit of an actual lull ... fortunately,
it’s that lull that allows me to prepare for
Columbia.”

At Columbia, Peña finds the film scene
“tremendously active”, and “my sense is that
there’s a lot of individual initiative.” But, he points
out that the profusion of campus film societies, like the one he
was a member of as a Harvard undergrad in the early ’70s, are
largely gone. “At a certain point in the ’80s, or maybe
even earlier, the soul of youth became more attracted to music than
it was to film, which was really the big metaphor for kids in the
’60s going into the ’70s.” As a result,
“there was this kind of generalized film culture that
doesn’t exist now.” So he has found that now “you
can’t assume that students know anything, ... that students
have ever really seen a Western or really know who Godard
is.”

However, as someone who straddles the line between academia and
the film festival world, Peña is optimistic about the
direction of film studies: “One of the things that began to
happen in the late ’80s/early ’90s in film studies was
that more and more people ... came in through Chinese studies or
Arab studies or things like that. They brought a welcome sense of
broadening. There was a moment I thought film culture ... was
essentially going to be about the same five Hitchcock films which
were just analyzed endlessly and which are endlessly
analyzable.” There’s now “a much greater
awareness of contemporary production” and “more
interest in what’s going on at festivals.”

At the Walter Reade Theater, Peña is able to program
in-depth regional series on contemporary world cinema alongside the
genre and director retrospectives common to New York’s film
repertory scene. “At its best,” he said, “Walter
Reade is analogous to what I imagine a museum department would
be—having the responsibility to help write history, ... and
take on programs that you hope will signal to people trends, new
ideas, auteurs that haven’t been properly assessed, and show
new work.” But while museum and non-profit theaters
“are working very well,” Peña can said that,
“what’s gone is that middle section of largely
commercial repertory houses,” which “led to a constant
feeding of film culture.”

One of Peña’s most memorable programming
experiences is how emotional Walter Reade's 1992 Iranian film
series was for Iranians in the audience and how the cultural
recognition brought their community together. That series was also
a major example of Peña’s early spotting and
presentation of global film trends. In this year’s NYFF,
there are three, in his words, “very strong” western
Middle Eastern films (from Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt),
“perhaps symbolizing the emergence of that area finally
becoming a place where we can expect new and powerful
cinema.”

As for Peña’s particular favorites from the lineup,
he laughed and said, “you’re asking me to choose
between my children!” Nonetheless, he singles out Eric
Rohmer’s latest: “I love a film like Triple
Agent—a remarkable film. To see someone like Rohmer,
83-years-old, make a film unlike anything he’s ever done
before—this kind of political intrigue, different levels of
plot, a certain boulevard feel, but in another way
harsher—it’s so inspiring to me when film culture seems
so bogged down in remaking, remaking, remaking and someone that age
continues to strive, to restore the medium.”