Geordie Williamson
speaker
728 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2018
last heard 21 Aug
Geordie Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I mean, I knew Pabs' name before I came to Kalman's novel, but I was always a great fan of Murnau and Lang.
They were the big cheese for me in that kind of early German expressionist era of um cinema.
But Pabs seems to be a little bit closer in sort of a documentary style, I think, probably to the playwrights of that era.
He's more of a Brecht dean.
And um, there's a hilarious moment in well, it's not hilarious, it's but horrible really, in the novel where Pabst has returned to Germany during World War II and Goebbels drags him in for a meeting.
And basically the first thing he says to him is, Oh, red Pabst, you're here.
Um, so that particular kind of left-leaning, more interested in the
Kind of socioeconomic um grind of the Weimar era rather than just glossing it over with lots of shiny things.
That seems to have been Pab's stock in trade.
But what's fascinating, obviously, in this book is that somebody who obviously is kind of on the right side of history in so many respects gets dragged down into the fascist gutter.
Kalman calls it soft moral bankruptcy and it's a portrait in soft moral bankruptcy for sure.
And she gets a wonderful cameo early on in the director where poor old Pabst has uh washed up in America um having tried to escape the kind of the gathering storm in the 30s.
And he's been given a film by the studio system.
It's a screenplay that's second rate.
He knows it is, he tells them it is, he makes the film it's not very good.
They close it after a single weekend.
His name is Dirt, and he goes to Greta cap in hand to ask her if she will be in a film to help save him.
And it's told from her perspective, and it's so wonderful how delicately she refuses him.
She is a star.
He has made her, she acknowledges that, but she will not be dragged down by him.
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