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Hannah Arendt
| Released |
27 September 2013 |
| Director |
Margarethe von Trotta |
Starring
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Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Janet McTeer, Julia Jentsch, Ulrich Noethen, Michael Degen, Nicholas Woodeson, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, Klaus Pohl, Timothy Lone |
Writer(s)
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Pam Katz, Margarethe von Trotta |
Producer(s)
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Bettina Brokemper, Johannes Rexin |
| Origin |
Germany, Luxembourg, France |
| Running Time |
113 minutes |
| Genre |
Biography, drama |
| Rating |
15A |
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The Evil of Banality.
For anyone with even a passing interest in philosophy, Hannah Arendt is a fascinating figure. Not only is she one of the most important figures in 20th century political thought, but her life story itself is so remarkable that it seems ripe for a biopic.
Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt picks up on what the German philosopher herself admitted was one of the defining events in her life, the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel. As a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt had a close personal stake in the trial.
Arendt’s report on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, was hugely controversial on it publication, partly for its suggestion that Eichmann wasn’t motivated by hatred or anti-Semitism. Rather the evil at work was the fact that he really was just blindly following orders, as he claimed in his defence. Hannah Arendt’s recreation of this trial, using archive footage of Eichmann, is an extraordinary evocation of exactly what Arendt witnessed in Jerusalem. Eichmann really does look like a banal bureaucrat, not a mass murderer. By letting the audience in on what actually happened, rather than a recreation, von Trotta places the audience in Arendt’s shoes, challenging them to reach a different conclusion than she did.
The problems with the film only set in later.
Once Arendt returns from Jerusalem and publishes her thoughts, the film shifts focus to the brutal critical response. Likewise the film shifts from exploring what Arendt actually said, to defending her against what people thought she said. The whole thing devolves into a dull series of academic discussions.
The real problem with Hannah Arendt is that it seems unclear whether it is telling the story of the person behind the ideas, or trying to explore what the ideas actually meant by rooting them in their historical context. Either way it fails. Arendt’s relationship with her husband and her friends is utterly unengaging, and serves little purpose other than exposition. Likewise the actual ideas she presented in A Report on the Banality of Evil are also underdeveloped, precisely because the film spends too long showing Arendt drinking wine with her fiends or lounging lethargically on her couch smoking cigarettes.
Arendt’s early life – which is in reality far more interesting – is devolved hastily through conversation and a series of ill-timed flashbacks. Which she may have claimed that the Eichmann experience was the keystone of her philosophical thought, it was her early life that defined much more of who she was as a person. Arendt’s troubled relationship with Martin Heidegger – her mentor and lover who later aligned himself with the Nazi party – is prime biopic material, but it is scarcely touched upon.
As it is, Hannah Arendt is an academic lecture rather than an intellectual pleasure. It hits most of the important notes without ever really engaging with them cinematically. It is a good film for philosophy students seeking an easy intro to Arendt, but not much of a joy for fans of the more cerebral cinema experience.
- Bernard O’Rourke |
