Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
The Circle of Evil: Wannsee Seen Through the Prism of the Film ‘Conspiracy’
Summary
David Peimer and Dennis Davis discuss the “conspiracy” film analysis, comparing two versions of a historical event and exploring the challenges of representing such events in film.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
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.
I think absolutely. Yes. Far right have taken this and absorbed it as a model for them, if you like, as a model for contemporary aesthetics of fascism and how they incorporated that into their own expression. You know, and we’ve seen many images recently of historical and political events.
Most certainly not. That was not his, if he had, he would’ve said so. That wasn’t at all what it is. We know that they’re huge amount of Holocaust deniers, when I’ve listened to the lecture and in fact it was quite clearly a justification.
I think it’s a fantastic point. Well one can either say it’s going to be a bottomless pit and it’ll be filled by some, by some other group. It finds, you know, another group whether they’re wearing orange shirts or green shirts or they’re tall or short or they’re bald or not.