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Feb. 22, 2013
Film has documentary feel
Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is well worth seeing.
DAVID PIERSON
“The banality of evil.” Most people have heard or read this phrase. Maybe even pondered it a little and been puzzled by it. How could something as monstrously evil as the Holocaust ever be considered banal?
But wonder no more, as the Victoria Film Festival kicked off its opening night gala with a screening of Hannah Arendt, which was directed by Germany’s Margarethe von Trotta.
Von Trotta gets such a terrific performance from Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt that the film almost makes you believe you’re watching a documentary about Arendt’s careful, considered decision to cover Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker under its legendary editor William Shawn.
Most films about writers, never mind philosophers, fail to be truly engaging, because, let’s face it: it’s boring watching someone stare at a blank page. But Hannah Arendt succeeds because it doesn’t dwell or show Arendt writing her controversial thesis. Where it excels is in showing how controversial it was for Shawn to hire Arendt, who had already raised hackles by positing questions about how much Jewish leaders were complicit in the Holocaust.
The film shows how reluctant Arendt was to take on the assignment at first. Once committed, however, Arendt threw herself into covering the trial completely. There is archival footage of Eichmann testifying and the film shows how Arendt totally immersed herself in the trial. Day after day, she watched Eichmann discourse, dispassionately telling his tale of processing and working to ship as many Jews to camps as possible.
When the trial was over and Eichmann was hanged, the sole state execution in Israel’s history, the film shows how Arendt took what seemed like forever to Shawn to deliver her thesis, which ran for weeks in The New Yorker, with, of course, much controversy.
“The banality of evil” was Arendt’s take on how a person, with society’s permission, is capable of acting in an unquestioning, almost-offhanded ignorance of the consequences of one’s actions. Her portrayal of Eichmann as a bureaucrat who did his duty and followed orders, rather than as a raving ideologue animated by demonic antisemitism, was strikingly unique at the time. According to Arendt, far from embodying “radical evil,” Eichmann exemplified “the banality of evil”: he had done evil, not because he had a sadistic will to do so, nor because he was deeply antisemitic, but because he failed to think through what he was doing.
Sukowa fully inhabits the character of Arendt. Smoking like a chimney, she is in nearly every frame of the film. Without speaking a word, she conveys the isolation, the spirit and the fierce intellect of Arendt, which her mentor and lover, German philosopher Martin Heidegger, once described as “the lonely business of thinking.” She transformed philosophy from intellectual abstraction into practical political action.
The film doesn’t go into Arendt’s later years – she was the first woman to become a full professor at Princeton – including her death in New York City from a major heart attack in 1975. But, for well over two decades, Arendt was one of America’s most prominent intellectuals, as well as a notoriously private person, who avoided interviewers and television cameras. So, it is a worthwhile journey to explore the collaboration between director von Trotta and actress Sukowa in bringing at least a part of Arendt’s story to the screen.
David Pierson is a freelance writer living in Victoria.
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