Director Enrique Bellande’s new documentary profile of a film collector opens the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium.
Dark Work, Light Play: On Fernando Martín Peña & La Vida a Oscuras
by Andrew Reichel (NYU Cinema Studies, MIAP Program)
Fernando Martín Peña looms large in cinephilia, even among the people who don’t know his name. He will forever be associated with the discovery of the most complete print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in the Museo del Cine collection. After over 80 years of access to incomplete copies, the museum and Deutsche Kinemathek brought one of the silent era’s most beloved films back into its most fully realized form. (He and Paula Félix-Didier tell the story in the 2010 documentary Metropolis Refound.) His polymathic work as a critic, teacher, writer, and collector/archivist, however, looms largest in the world of Argentine cinephilia. Prints from his personal collection of some 8,000 titles are regularly projected in the cinematheques, museums, and schools of Buenos Aires. His cult after-midnight public TV program Filmoteca is a freewheeling showcase of films, with him introducing movies ranging from arthouse classics to pornography, including his “descamisado” tribute to Roger Vadim.
Argentina has not yet succeeded in building a national cinematheque or archive for preservation of its extensive audiovisual heritage, despite its enormous contributions to cinematic history. Attempts were made with the passage of a 1999 law, but it remains deadlocked in bureaucracy, and many of Argentina’s most invaluable pieces of cinematic heritage remain at risk of being lost forever. The nation’s recent economic woes, combined with the ascent of Javier Milei to the presidency and his attempts to gut the nation film board and cultural-sector funding, essentially guarantee that it will not be happening for several more years.
As documented in La Vida a Oscuras, Peña’s construction of a “tower” of films in climate-controlled storage is one of the significant resources keeping cinema preserved in Argentina. His print library has paved the way for restorations and revivals of many Argentine cinematic discoveries, and in fact holds unique prints of films from other countries. While such things are impossible to measure, his efforts have also arguably laid the groundwork for the cinephiles making up the New Argentine Cinema, which launched around the start of the twenty-first century and has since ascended to the forefront of the contemporary film world.
Director Enrique Bellande has made a documentary about Peña, La vida a oscuras (Life in the Dark). It is his first release since 2005, and the transition to digital projection that has occurred since then is shown as just another obstacle for Peña to keep digging past. His legacy is intertwined between work and play — a lifetime’s effort in collecting, writing, researching, and more, all for the pleasure of certain moments of artistic pleasure in a dark room. As someone whose life has been the ultimate testament to the sheer effort involved in making a certain kind of rediscovery, it is a fitting way to open the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium and its “Work and Play” theme.
