Professor David Peimer
Can Film Represent the Holocaust?
Summary
How do we represent the Holocaust in film? Can we represent it? Should we represent it? Professor David Peimer show clips of seven radically different films about the Holocaust which represent the essence of this debate.
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 a great point. I’m not sure actually. I don’t think it would do so well. It doesn’t have enough action. It doesn’t have enough, let’s call it, you know, big drama and action and sequences. You know, it’s set in the pawnbroker’s space, a little bit in the street outside. A little bit of a few other spaces. It’s a very low budget film. I’m not sure it would have success. I watched a very interesting interview with last night actually. There was a BBC documentary on Spielberg and interviews with Spielberg and many of the people who work with him and many others. And the one, made an important point when Spielberg made Schindler, even though he was, made a really good point, said that pitching something like Schindler, a nearly three hour film about the Holocaust set in the camps, et cetera, et cetera. Can you imagine any Hollywood studio today agreeing to finance it? And this guy was saying, you know, it wasn’t guaranteed to be the smash financial hit that it was. It wasn’t guaranteed to be so globally powerful at all. And Spielberg throughout all his, as he called it in his words, all his cinematic tricks and he used a handheld camera and many, many other things went back to the basics of filmmaking. There was no guarantee at the time it would even make its money back. So we have to weigh that as well. Even somebody as famous and well known, it was not assured in the slightest. It could have been hated on the one hand and a total disaster on the other and a commercial disaster. Who knows? He might not have got a job. So these debates are part of the total complexity of all of these films. But I think we would be much the poorer if we could not engage in the debate that’s part of us as lovers of education and discussion and artistic thinking.