Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 13, 2013 3:13 pm 
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BARBARA SUKOWA IN HANNA ARENDT

A woman of cold intellectual passion

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt is a film about the time in the life of the eponymous German-American writer and teacher when she reported on the Adolph Eichmann trial in Israel (held in 1962), which became a long New Yorker article, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," later turned into a book. The magazine piece was controversial because Arendt refused to brand Eichamann as a monster and pointed out that the trial, whose whole setup she questioned, showed the cooperation of Jewish leaders aided the Holocaust. As she told it, Eichmannn emerged in the trial (of which original footage is shown) as a mere bureaucrat, "just following orders," not thinking on his own, not even anti-Semitic, simply an example of what she dubbed the banality of evil.

Von Trotta's film is old fashioned and conventional, even a bit clunky and obvious. But it is at least a sincere attempt to depict a person who lives by ideas. For all the cigarette-puffing and clinches with husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) and former lovers (including Martin Heidigger; she was his star pupil and a bit more), or friendly contact with the writer Mary McCarthy (Janet McAteer), the emotional peak comes when Arendt defends her thinking about the Eichmann trial to a lecture hall full of students and faculty opponents.

Barbara Sukowa, who has played several of von Trotta's other heroines, gives a restrained, convincing performance as the coolly passionate Arendt, though she seems too well dressed and buttoned down for this feisty intellectual, who had herself escaped from Nazi Germany and then from the Vichy government, facts barely touched on here. All other personalities, including the goofy and lightweight New Yorker staff, as depicted here, come off as quite secondary. But somehow, as long as you focus on Hannah and her intellectual adventure, the movie works, at least as a Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial for Dummies. You begin to glimpse the idea: she would not fall into simple scapegoating, which the trial in some eyes threatened to be, and her philosophical interpretation of events was far more important to her than simple reporting.

Most of the film is in German, with important patches (including the oral defense) in English. The focus is often more on Arendt's relationship with her husband, an old beau in Israel, Heidigger, and her glamorous American friend than on her academic work, except for when the university draws away from her after the Eichmann piece. The settings are a bit vague, except for glimpses of New York and what may be a patch of Jerusalem. The black and white footage of the actual Eichmann trial, imperfectly integrated into the recreation of Arendt's stint in Jerusalem, steals the show. These extraordinary old images have a sense of vastness somehow, despite the prisoner's famous confinement to a glass cage, and Eichmann himself is astonishingly clear and articulate. This film is reverential about Arendt, but wasn't she at least to some extent fooled by Eichmann's claim he was "only following orders"? Isn't that always the excuse? However, Arendt's 'discovery' that evil-doing is often a thoughtless, collective process carried out by dutiful bureaucrats points to ever-present dangers relevant today at a moment of ominous repression and massive surveillance.

One can vaguely imagine a film that didn't waste so much time on genteel New York apartment interiors, cozy moments with men, vapid German-American social gatherings, and dwelt instead on the trial and Arendt's evolving perception of it and evolving ideas about evil growing out of it. But to make ideas dramatic is a tough game, at best.

Hannah Arendt, 113 mins., debuted at Toronto 2012, opened in NYC 29 May 2013. Screened for this review at Film Forum in New York 13 June. The film will be shown at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Sunday, 28 July. San Francisco theatrical opening 2 August.

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