Professor Richard Peña Co-curated Free Video-on-Demand Platform
Professor of Professional Practice Richard Peña co-curated American Fringe with Livia Bloom Ingram. American Fringe is an annual film showcase presented by the Arts Arena at Cinémathèque Française in Paris. The showcase screened on Cinémathèque Française’s Video-on-Demand platform, Henri. The platform offers a range of rare cinematic gems from their film collection or presented in partnership with directors, distributors, festivals or fellow archives from around the world.
The showcase included eight films, two from each of the previous four editions of American Fringe, 195 Lewis, A Great Lamp, Green House, Men Go To Battle, Neighborhood Food Drive, Rukus, The Nine, and Tired Moonlight.
In an interview with Cinémathèque Française, Ingram said “It’s become increasingly difficult to define Independent Cinema in the United States. With well over a thousand productions made annually, and the continuing reduction of studio based productions, just about anyone can claim to be independent.”
Peña said, “with the uptick of production has come a loss of meaning for the term. When people first started speaking about independent cinema in the 1930’s they were referring to films by the Worker’s Film and Photo League or the early American avant-garde -- films that were different from the commercial productions of Hollywood, in terms of their production style, in terms of their distribution, exhibition and different aesthetically and politically. Nowadays what passes for independent cinema is not that different from television or your local multiplex.”
“It was to celebrate this work that American Fringe was created. We’re delighted to have the chance to present this new virtual edition in one of the silver linings of 2020 along with so much loss and chaos. The films in American Fringe represent a range of styles and subjects, but what unites them is their shared commitment to bridging to the screen deeply personal visions of America today in all its complexity,” said Ingram.
Richard Peña has been at Columbia since 1989, went full time in 1996 and was named Professor of Professional Practice in 2003. He has taught film history and theory at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Paris/Sorbonne, the University of São Paulo, Beijing University and Jadavpur University. Peña has also served as the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012.
At the Film Society, he has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Gabriel Figueroa, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Chinese, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Japanese Soviet and Argentine cinema. He is also currently the co-host of Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.
The Cinémathèque Française is a French film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris, the archive offers daily screenings of worldwide films.