Professor David Peimer
Portrait of Evil, Part 1: Hitler in Film
Summary
Professor David Peimer takes a look at several examples of how Hitler is portrayed in film after the end of the war. He focuses specifically on two questions: From an artistic point of view, what do you do with an historical icon who can be seen as utterly monstrous, pure evil, and so on? And, what do you do when you’re trying to, in a sense, look at history and fictionalize it, but based on a certain number of historical facts?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre in the UK. He has worked for the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 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 in New York, UK, Berlin, EU Parliament (Brussels), Athens, Budapest, Zululand and more. He has most recently directed Dame Janet Suzman in his own play, Joanna’s Story, at London Jewish Book Week. He has published widely with books including: Armed Response: Plays from South Africa, the digital book, Theatre in the Camps. He is on the board of the Pinter Centre (London), and has been involved with the Mandela Foundation, Vaclav Havel Foundation and directed a range of plays at Mr Havel’s Prague theatre.
That’s what I’ve tried to address. And that’s a fantastic debate. The Hitler of Stalin and their approaches, if you like, to performance and how they’ve been portrayed in film and the difference between the two. Stalin comes from similar absolute poverty background, or not so similar, but even more poverty of a background. Failed poet Stalin. But he rises through the bureaucratic ranks of the Communist Party.
Yes. It’s evidence in Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and many, many other examples.
Exactly, I mean, Alec Guinness, he said that “I wanted to try and avoid sympathy,” but he doesn’t. And that’s why I keep coming back to the Alec Guinness interpretation, because of that class influence. And he can’t escape his own culture of that Britishness, that Englishness, I should say, ‘cause not Scottish or necessarily Welsh Irish, but that he can’t escape it. So, it’s a reason considerate. To me, it’s almost like a sort of elderly school master or an elderly, strict, kindish uncle. And which freaks me out far more than Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards or many of the other films, or the satires of Mel Brooks, The Producers. That freaked me out. That sends me shivers up my spine when I watch the Alec Guinness in that way, because I can see mass consumption of that for the character.