Richard / Jeff

Richard at Lincoln Center

Richard Peña talks to Jeff Melvoin about becoming a film historian after his time at Harvard shed little light on the subject. 

Richard entered Harvard with a love of movies but full awareness that cinema wasn’t necessarily a welcome subject on campus.   He took the few desultory film courses that were offered, haunted area movie houses like the Brattle and Orson Welles, but, drawing on his Spanish and Puerto Rican heritage, majored in Latin American History and Literature.  “What was I going to do with film?  I had no idea.”

After graduation, he traveled to Brazil to soak up what he could about the film industry there.  Subsequent teaching positions at Harvard and Berkeley resulted in his becoming curator of film at the Art Institute of Chicago and then program director of the prestigious New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012, during which time he also became a professor of film studies at Columbia University, where he continues to teach.  

            But even as cinema became the subject of serious academic focus and film technology sparked an explosion of global filmmaking unthinkable in 1975, Richard confesses he hasn’t seen a corresponding broadening of tastes among audiences.  “My students nowadays tend to be much more closed-minded about cinema than they were in the 1990s,” he says, because their frame of reference is television. “Rather than referring to a Bergman film, for example, they’ll say, ‘It’s like that episode of The Wire.’ “  

            Although it was 1893 when Edison invented the Kinetoscope, a device that allowed individual viewers to watch a film strip through a peep hole, the birth of cinema as we know it is attributed to the Lumière brothers in 1895, when they first projected a film to a public audience. Today, with the advent of streaming, home theaters, smart pads, and smart phones, many viewers appear content to watch movies by themselves. Richard muses, “Perhaps Edison’s having the last laugh.