David Herman
The Genius of Emeric Pressburger
Summary
David Herman discusses the under appreciated work of screenwriter, film director, and producer Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988). Additionally, he discusses why Jewish Romanian writers like him are not better known.
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
This is the question at the heart of his achievement, I would say, is that he managed to pick up languages wherever he went. I don’t think he learned Romanian, but he started off with Hungarian. He then learned German, obviously in Germany and wrote screenplays in German. He then wrote screenplays in French in almost no time at all. And then he wrote screenplays in English in almost no time at all, possibly the greatest screenplays ever written in for British cinema. So it’s a very good, he just obviously had an extraordinary gift for languages, as did Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder, his friend, said that when he came to America, he learned English by listening to baseball commentary on the radio. And he learned English incredibly quickly. These people just had extraordinary gifts for learning languages.
Well not to my knowledge, but he was buried in a Christian cemetery. So it’s an interesting question. On the other hand, there was a star of David strange thing to find in on a grave in a Christian cemetery. So not as far as I know. But it’s interesting that his nephew who wrote this wonderful biography does not go near any of these kind of questions, which is very, very strange.
I’m really sad to say. I think it was. The other thing is, of course Powell was the director and from Andrew Sarris in the late 1950s when he came up with, famous American film critic, who came up with the auteur theory, the director, not anybody else was the great figure behind great films like John Ford and Billy Wilder and so on and so forth. You know, critics for the next generation really began to think of the director as the key figure. Powell was the director, Pressburger was the writer. So I think partly because he was a foreigner with a strange name, but I think also because he was the writer, essentially. So even despite their joint credit produced, written, directed by, he was, Powell was the director.