Professor David Peimer
The Genius of Alfred Hitchcock
Summary
In this talk we will explore what makes Hitchcock such a brilliant filmmaker and zoom in on some of his iconic films, focusing on his use of visual techniques and the development of character, atmosphere, ideas, and the rise and release of tension to create his cinematic masterpieces. We will also investigate what makes his films still so great today.
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 think it became a fashionable thing for Hitchcock and quite a lot of others, you know, put themselves in a brief like couple of seconds clip in the movie themselves. I think it was a bit of a, and so is today, where the director puts themselves in for a few seconds, a kind of a fashion thing. Also, it’s part of playing with the medium in a way.
A: Well, that’s a huge thing. He said the police and the Jesuits. And I would imagine his mother. I mean, it’s quite an image in “Psycho” and other mother in “Marnie,” the image of the mother in “Marnie” is horrific. I mean, we get a cathartic resolution and the cathartic resolution, everybody comes together, understanding, brings them all together in a not lovey-dovey but sentimental way at the end of the movie “Marnie.” But certainly, perhaps even more than blondes in distress were mothers. But it’s a lot of ambiguous scholarly stuff written or stuff written about him and his own mother. More about his father actually, interestingly, being the greengrocer.