Grzegorz Skorupski: In the description of the project I came across the following sentence: ‘The idea of Cinema For Social Change Project is to present a collection of films from around the world, to highlight the stories of the individuals who in their own way decided to take a stand.’ Do you think a film is a good medium to propagate the democratic ideas which are the base of the project? Why is film a good way to pass on the emotions of the people dealing with their own private issues and to provoke the audience to think of themselves in such a situation?
Richard Peña: I think it’s the very basic nature of the film. Film has the very audiovisual asset to transport us to places that are very unfamiliar. We’re showing the films in Armenia but we will take the audience to Afghanistan, to Mexico, to many different places. And in a sense, even though these places are far away, they depict drama that could be very familiar. So it has the ability to bring us sometimes to places that while on the outside are seemingly different, but when we get close to them we recognize how close they are to our own experience. When we look at a human face we understand pain, we understand happiness, we understand frustration, we understand determination – these are things that go beyond individual culture. So because of that cinema is a very good medium.
More information about the project here.
GS: Nowadays veryone who has a telephone with a little camera and access to internet can make a film and put it online. And obviously, there are many nice movies, like artistic ones, funny ones, social ones but on the other hand, it might be a tool in the hands of, for instance, Muslim fundamentalists, so what do you think about responsibility in this case – does it concern on the audience?
RP: I think I would always opt on the side of no control. I think censorship is a very slippery slope, as we say in English; once we get to censor things, then you open up a door for many other things to be censored.
So it works both ways. There are times if you say everyone has the right to march and to express their opinions and then suddenly people call themselves American Nazis and march down your town. You have to defend their right to march. If you really believe in civic freedom, you must defend them. No matter how much you hate what they stand for.
I am very much a civil rights activist, I believe very much that the moment we begin to censor anything, there will be a door open for censorship down the road of things that you believe in. So I’d rather tolerate things which I don’t approve of than allow censorship.
GS: The goal of the project is rather to offer a selection of films and invite the partner to cooperation with their own ideas. A good example of this is in the selection of films to be shown in Armenia. Could you say a couple of words about those Armenian documentaries?
RP: We want to create a dialogue and once we came up with our idea about what we wanted to do and regarding what we wanted it to be, we didn’t necessarily find films within that limited sample, in the limited time we had, that fit absolutely with our criteria of what we were looking for. But we did find forms that we found interesting, e.g. that film about the homeless people – it’s a film which gives way to people who normally are voiceless, when suddenly they can talk about themselves, have a sense of themselves in their place and in their rights.
In films such as Presumed Guilty or Afghan Star people were showing that even in a state of homelessness they demand a certain amount of civil rights. And that was a kind of interesting way of looking at it, so again, it’s an educational experience for us, it gives us new insights, it offered us new material that we hadn’t had access to.
GS: You agreed to take part in the workshops in Armenia. Would you like to say a few words about both rounds of workshops?
RP: In the first one we’re talking about the question of film criticism, especially in the digital age, because in a certain way you can say that the digital age has made everyone a filmmaker has also a film critic. Now, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of blogs in the United States, across Europe and across the world, where people are writing their own film criticism. Now, of course anybody can publish that.
So, what would that mean for film criticism, what would that mean in general for the dialogue we have about film, what would that do to notions such as aesthetics, what would that do in terms of interpretation that we have; a lot of this kind of ideas that I think have been around for so long that we depend on in terms of how to think about films.
The point is that it’s a new democracy of critical voice that we have, many people have a chance to express themselves about a film and would have never expressed themselves before. So you have to figure out which is which; sometimes wonderful dub-over voices, sometimes you cant make out anything of it with everybody shouting but again it’s better to have too many voices than not enough.
GS: The second workshop is about African American cinema, which is an area unexplored by us
RP: On one hand people often think that they know American cinema very well, which in a sense is true, because American cinema imposed itself so well all over the world on everybody; they kind of do. But there are many aspects of American film, corners that they don’t know at all, that we don’t know at all; and one that I grew myself interested in, many years ago, was the fact that around 1915 the American community created the concept; they created their own cinema, financed by that community, made by members of that community, with the actors from that community and shown within that community.
And if you look at the history of American race relations in the early part of the XX century, there existed in the United States a real kind of segregation where blacks and whites really had almost nothing or little to do with each other as they possibly could in many parts of their life; so blacks were forced to establish their own institutions, their own churches, their own schools, their own stores and their art. And in a way, through this a lot of creativity came out – their own fantastic music such as jazz and blues, their own literature, fantastic writers, a great visual art tradition and cinema which from 1915 until 1952 produced around 500 feature films and those were films which were shown almost exclusively in African American private circuit. Whites knew almost nothing about those films.
They were never reviewed in Variety, New York Times, Hollywood Reporter or any of the major journals of the day and then about 1952 or so, when Hollywood discovered African American audience it began hiring people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and all those generation of very talented African American actors to work in Hollywood films, this independent African American cinema disappeared. And what was a tragedy was that a lot of films were simply thrown away, they never existed in many copies anyway so most of that cinema is lost.
Not all of them were great but there are some extraordinarily interesting films and very, very creative ones. And again it’s a great example of American genius – in the name of Do It Yourself; here people living in incredibly oppressed conditions and somehow aware of it all to make their own feature films and distribute and exhibit them on their own. It’s a remarkable story. In fact, there’s many of them. I always try to tell a little bit about this history, I always try to do a bit more promotion for it because still a lot of work needs to be done but unfortunately we haven’t come up with enough funds to do as much as we need to but anyway I want to present the work of people who were in as low and oppressed positions as possible, nevertheless they created their own film art and their art reflected their position, they were political in many ways; they were sort of below the radar, the mainstream American deal.
GS: This is a very open question but what are your expectations? What would you like to see in the end, what would be good to see in Armenia after the project is done?
RP: That is a good question. I think what I’m looking for is to learn what reactions of people in Armenia will be to particular films. So much of the dialogue we know is between what you might call metropolitan centres such as the United States and Western Europe and the rest of the world and the idea of having dialogue between Armenia and Mexico or Armenia and China really is a great thing. And I’m happy to be a part of it.
I’m curious for them to have this experience and see how they react to these particular stories and see to what extent they see it as something having to do with their own lives and what their reaction is to these particular stories. I think we’re there as much to learn as to teach. We’re not here to give them an agenda but to offer these films and then gather reactions and hopefully create dialogue.
Richard Peña was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival 1988 through 2012. A frequent lecturer on a wide variety of film topics, he is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema, and from 2006 to 2009 was a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University. He is also currently the co-host in New York of Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.
The Cinema for Social Change project is organized by Culture.pl as part of a program aimed at developing cooperation and cultural exchange with the Eastern Partnership countries.
April 2015, edited by LB