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 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.
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.