Professor David Peimer
Medieval Epics in Cinema
Summary
Professor David Peimer takes a look at some of cinema’s medieval epics which document Europe and the transition from the Roman era to after the Middle Ages. Specifically explored is the connection between stories and myths and history, and whether these stories can be taken as fact or fiction.
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.
Yes. And I think there’s a wonderful, I would call it a creative tension between documentary filmmaker and fiction filmmaker, based on something in its history. But they’ll both have to use techniques of storytelling. And these are very profound, well studied from Eisenstein all the way through. The techniques, you’ve got to make the story work. And, you know, how you work with the characters, the goody, the baddy, the underling, the other characters, how you bring in the set, the costumes, how you move from scene to scene and so on. But it’s the elements of storytelling, as Aristotle reminds us in 33 pages of brilliance in his poetics. It’s the storytelling. You’ve got to evoke pity or fear. It’s got to have the character of who has the undeserved misfortune that we feel the most for, with Aristotle. So I think documentary filmmakers try to find similar elements in the telling of the documentary. Of course, they try to stick much closer to the fiction, to the fact, sorry, the historical accuracy of what actually happened as opposed to making it up, but they still have to dramatize it in some way.