Tag Archives: hannah arendt

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

See “Hannah Arendt” for the Sukowa, If Not the Full Story

Hannah Arendt opens on July 19 in at Seven Gables Theatre.

Adolf Eichmann, reported political theorist Hannah Arendt for the New Yorker in 1963, was “thoughtless,” a boastful bureaucrat who said, “Officialese is my only language.” When Arendt said Eichmann couldn’t think, she explained that what she meant was: “think from the standpoint of somebody else.” In many ways, Arendt’s peculiar indictment of Eichmann — a man many believed to be the logistical force behind millions of death-camp murders — was, as befitted the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, a critique of the social structures that permitted not just Eichmann but nearly all Germans not to imagine what was happening in those camps.

For Arendt, Eichmann was an edge case that demonstrated how normal people could not think about the Holocaust as it occurred. Here was a man whose job it was to know, and who nonetheless could, burying himself in the minutiae of genocide, feel no remorse as a consequence of his actions. He was, he said in the language of Nuremberg, just following orders. In at least one instance, Eichmann discovered one of the people he thought of as a “useful” Jew had been sent to a death camp. Though unwilling simply to free him — that would have meant challenging his superiors — Eichmann got the man a light work detail, sweeping a gravel path, feeling very contented with himself, although the man was killed just weeks later.

For her eponymous film, director Margarethe von Trotta worked again with Barbara Sukowa, who plays Arendt in middle age as bursting with intellectual and romantic fervor (her marriage to Axel Milberg’s Heinrich Blücher is a lusty fairytale), but with a hawkish dispossession, her eyes glinting as they fasten on Eichmann during his trial. She can hardly believe how feeble a thinker of any sort he is, this, the fabled Eichmann, and it’s this experience that prompts her to refocus on the “banality” of Eichmann’s evil. He is not heroic, a Faustian devil — he’s a mindless cog put to use by a warped ideology.

In the context of film as artwork, von Trotta’s major gesture is in the way that Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) makes appearances throughout the film. Von Trotta doesn’t underline it in the American way of having Arendt deliver a subtextual monologue to Heidegger, but his presence is a counterpoint to her (salutary, I think) demolition of a cult of Eichmann. Heidegger, after all, was a German who could think, as Arendt knew from her relationship with him. And yet, there he had been, a newly minted Nazi Party member and rector of the University of Freiburg. Eichmann may have been on trial publicly, but it was Heidegger’s betrayal, von Trotta suggests, that weighed on Arendt’s mind.

The latter part of Von Trotta’s film turns on the blowback to Arendt’s incendiary article — it brought threats and cost her old friends. She’s berated for not having imagined, ironically enough, this eventuality. (It’s possible she meant it in a pedagogical way, but her discussion of the cooperation of Jewish councils with the Nazis was guaranteed to be inflammatory. If you can’t resist, Arendt wrote, you still have the option of doing nothing to help. That’s a strategic assessment, perhaps similar to the calculus on dealing with terrorist hijackers. But it sounded like victim-blaming.)

If you are not steeped in the era’s history, Hannah Arendt may feel like a Cliff’s Notes version, as arguments tend to be set up rather than developed. Minor characters come off as spokespeople doing walk-ons.

It’s possible to watch the film and feel Arendt was simply terribly put-upon, a frank academic who believed too strongly in the truth, rather than someone who made dubious claims in print about Eichmann’s “Zionism.” Von Trotta’s portrayal of the New Yorker staff also feels lightly mocking of their middlebrow concerns — they didn’t know what they were getting into. Poor William Shawn is always on the phone, checking on Arendt’s progress. (Eichmann’s trial began in April 1961. He was hanged end of May 1962. Arendt’s series didn’t run until February 1963.)

Von Trotta’s Arendt, honey-badger-like, cows Shawn with a few sharp words. But surely that truck colliding into Arendt’s taxi in Central Park in March of 1962 — she woke in the ambulance, with a number of broken ribs — also slowed her down. Von Trotta elides these kinds of things, just as Arendt did in her treatment of Eichmann, making a larger point. But in von Trotta’s case, this is a miscalculation. When all you hear at length is Arendt’s eloquent defenses, you’re robbed of much the drama of the actual debate.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

It’s the Elles of Cinema, at SIFF

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Elles: SAM is still on view at Seattle Art Museum, until February 17. But you have only today through Sunday, January 27, to catch SIFF’s Women in Cinema series, featuring a number of new works from women filmmakers. As with SAM’s exhibit, the overwhelming impression is that of diversity of perspectives and interests.

Opening night, for instance, offers you the chance to take in an erotic sci-fi thriller along with a film about Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. Director Margarethe von Trotta and actor Barbara Sukowa were “remarkably successful” say the Hollywood Reporter in their attempt to dramatize the juridical process that led Arendt to coin her phrase, “the banality of evil.” Hannah Arendt screens just once, this evening.

Vanishing Waves, from director Kristina Buozyte, screens again on Saturday. It’s the European arthouse response to Brainstorm – a young researcher is hooked up to a comatose patient, to see if computers can decode two brains talking. (The coma helps because there’s less “noise” from outside stimuli.) But what no one has anticipated — the research team is an all-Europe, largely male endeavor — is the emotional and sexual loneliness of the coma patient. Many films about dreams fail to supply that know-it-when-you-see-it dreamlike quality, but Buozyte succeeds in creating scenes of great beauty and savagery.

There’s also Australian director Cate Shortland’s Lore, about a grueling cross-country trip made by Lore and her four younger siblings after their Nazi parents are taken by the Allies at the end of World War II, in which the indoctrinated children come face to face with a world their parents have not prepared them for. Rotten Tomatoes is a big fan.

In Love, Marilyn, director Liz Garbus tries to catch the many facets of Monroe with the combined talents of Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn, Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Jennifer Ehle, Lindsay Lohan, Lili Taylor, Uma Thurman, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood, their portrayals interspersed with outtakes, home movies, photos, and interviews. The Dandelions is the French answer to what happens when Isabelle Rosellini is your child psychologist; Satellite Boy, from Australian director Catriona McKenzie, pits Aboriginal culture against the mining of the West.

The documentary The World Before Her contrasts the views of contestants in the Miss India pageant with the women’s wing of the Hindu fundamentalist movement, while Midnight’s Children, directed by Deepa Mehta, is Salman Rushdie’s own adaptation of his picaresque novel.