Professor David Peimer
The Great Director Fritz Lang: In Germany and Hollywood
Summary
Professor David Peimer explores the life and work of renowned film director Fritz Lang (1890–1976).
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, Lang and he had a whole group of people working with them and et cetera. He was pretty much a dictator himself. Very dictatorial with his actors, with the camera, the camera people, and the set designers. He himself was not immune from being a director as dictator. That whistle in M is Fritz Lang’s whistle. It’s not Peter Lorre’s ‘cause he thought he’ll do it the best. He knows what he wants.
Well, he would certainly have known. I mean it was such a fertile period, the twenties, and they would all have known what was happening all over. So how involved, I don’t know. But I am sure he would’ve known about the Bauhaus. Because of absolutely as you say, the set designs relate.
That’s a great question, because in the interview with William Friedkin, he talks about in the beginning, he didn’t want to go to dialogue and sound. But of course, he recognized and he was quick always to recognize changes in technology and changes in society, and quick to grab stories and technology. But he made a point of that he was only going to use it very sparingly in the beginning. So that’s why it’s very minimally used. At the end of M it’s the whole speech. But before that, it’s quite minimalist, the use of dialogue and speech. It’s there of course. And I think that’s part because he understood that film relies on the montage or the juxtaposition of visual imagery. Obviously, it’s a visual medium primarily and sound and the spoken word’s secondary, very much. So I think that he was absolutely aware and he took it slowly into what becomes, and we saw at the final speech at the end of M where dialogue, where the spoken word is much, much more. So I think he smartly moved between the two, silent to talking.