Professor David Peimer
Post-War Renaissance in German Film: Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders
Summary
Professor David Peimer explores the life and work of four of the most significant and interesting post-war German filmmakers: Rainer Warner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Volker Schlondorff.
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, I haven’t seen that many lately in the last eight, 10 years. Certainly post-Covid or even pre-Covid, perhaps there are many that come to the same idea. I think these guys were so obsessed with struggling to understand from their outsider position, struggling to understand their own parents and grandparents generation of the war and history, all these big themes. I think they were obsessed in a way that they had to tell the stories. And I’m not sure if that same level of obsession exists today. Even looking at post East Germany and West Germany post the fall of communism.
Yes. They all looked at power and authoritarianism in love relationships, in family, and then for Herzog in the big grandiose mythical stories of history.