Hannah Arendt

source: Hannah Arendt

Other reviewers have questioned the historical accuracy of Margarethe von Trotta's portrayal of Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) and her opinion of the Jewish leaders as expressed in her NEW YORKER articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. As a piece of film-making, however, HANNAH ARENDT grabs the attention and does not let go throughout its 113-minute running- time. As portrayed by Sukowa, Arendt comes across as a forthright person, not frightened of expressing her opinions and responding to any intellectual challenges from close friends such as Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael Degen). Yet beneath that tough surface lurks a profoundly disillusioned person, as she discovers to her cost that her great teacher and mentor Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) does not practice what he preaches. Although insistent on reinforcing the distinction between "reason" and "passion," Heidegger takes the "passionate" decision to associate himself with the Nazi party, and thereby embraces their totalitarian values. Like Eichmnann himself, he chooses not to "think" but to commit himself to an ideology that actively discourages individual thought. The sense of shock and disillusion Arendt experiences inevitably colors her view of the Eichmann trial. Director von Trotta includes several close-ups of her sitting in the press-room listening to the testimony of Eichmann, his accusers and the witnesses, a quizzical expression on her face, as if she cannot quite make sense of what she hears. She cannot condemn Eichmann, because he has simply followed Heidegger's course of action. Once the articles have been published, Arendt experiences an almost unprecedented campaign of vilification. Although she is given a climactic scene where she defends herself in front of her students (and her accusers within the university faculty), we get the sense that she is only doing so on the basis of abstractions; her personal feelings are somehow disengaged. She is far more affected when her one-time close friend Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen) vows never to talk to her again on account of her views. Philosophers might be able to make sense of the world, but they often neglect human relations. Consequently our view of Arendt, as portrayed in this film, is profoundly ambivalent. While empathizing with her views about the banality of evil, which reduces people to automata as they claim they were only carrying out orders, even while being involved in atrocities, Arendt herself comes across as rather myopic, so preoccupied with her ideas that she has little or no clue about how they might affect those closest to her. It's a wonder, therefore, that Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) chooses to stick with her through the worst of circumstances. Ingeniously combining archive footage of the Eichmann trial with color re-enactments of what happened during that period, HANNAH ARENDT is a thought-provoking piece, even if we find it difficult to identify with the central character.

This is a fascinating look at Hanna Arendt, a German-American philosopher who in 1961 reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. A huge controversy erupted. Arendt left Germany in 1933 for France, but when Germany invaded France, she found herself in a detention camp. When the film begins, she is a happily married woman with friends such as the writer Mary McCarthy, and she is a professor at, among other places, the New School in New York City. Hanna is very excited about covering the trial, but her husband, Heinrich, is afraid it will take her back to those dark days. While observing Eichmann, Arendt is struck by the fact that he was an ordinary man with nothing special about him. This causes her to think about the nature of evil itself. She decides that he's not a monster but a person who suppressed his conscience in order to be obedient to the Nazis. She thus created the concept of the "banality of evil." She believed also that some Jewish leaders at the time had fallen into this trap and unwittingly participated in the Holocaust. Her critics failed to understand her meaning. In some camps, her New Yorker articles were not well received, as she was seen as a heartless turncoat who blamed the victims. Hanna has to defend her ideas, and the price she pays for them is high. Barbara Sukowa does a magnificent job as Arendt, showing the woman's brilliance, courage, affection for friends and family, and hurt when some people she loved turned against her. It's surprising that she was met with as much disdain as she was -- but Arendt did not believe in blind adoration of any group. She took people on an individual basis. As far as the banality of evil, evil has always had the ordinary face of people sitting back and doing what they're told. Or, as Martin Luther King said, doing nothing. I'm sure many of us have experienced this in the workplace -- I know I did. It's then that you realize the true nature of most people. Everyone can say they have ethics - but do they have ethnics when they stand to lose something? Beautifully directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who also co-wrote the screenplay. A difficult subject made clear, a complicated woman understandable -- no small feat. A thought-provoking film.

This is a marvelous movie! Really made me consider the brilliant original thinking of this woman, and I was surprised by the hysterical opposition to what she in her own honesty reported. Very well acted and directed, a tension ran through the entire movie, making one feel that one was on the edges of an important discovery about the fundamental nature of humanity. And the movie did not disappoint. One week after seeing the film, the thought lingers: We live in a world of lies and deception, because by and large we are afraid of the truth. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but most of us prefer to live our lives in the dark shadows of our ideologies rather than step into the searing light: that good and evil resides in each of us, and that each of us is capable of the most unspeakable evils under the right conditions. All it takes is for us to stop thinking and just blindly "do our duty" and follow orders, as Adolph Eichmann did. Brilliant movie!

Every once in a while you'll see a really good performance that's prevented from being great by the film around it. That's the case with Barbara Sukowa as the title character in "Hannah Arendt," a dramatization of a controversial episode in the writer and philosopher's life when she was ostracized for writing a piece in "The New Yorker" about the trials of Eichmann that Jews felt sympathized too much with the Nazi cause. The tone of the film is overly righteous and leaves its audience no room to come to a conclusion on its own. In the world of the film, Hannah is a hero of free speech and free thinking, while those who are offended by her are portrayed as narrow-minded, rat-faced villains. The entire film has a feeling of artifice that it can't overcome -- the actors move around the set like actors in a play, reciting obviously scripted lines in strange, haughty tones, their noses literally in the air. Even Janet McTeer, an actress who I love, seems ill at ease with the material she's given. Only the performance of Sukowa makes this film worth watching, even if the primary feeling watching her is how much better her performance could have been if the movie itself was better. One moment and one moment only, a rousing monologue she delivers during the film's finale, in which she defends her point of view to a room full of students and faculty members, provides a glimpse of the powerful movie "Hannah Arendt" could have been. Grade: B-

With a new director, new producer, new cinematographer, new editor, new script and new lead actress, this might be a fine movie. I fear the world is filled with those who vaunt this dreary film because they espouse what Arendt had to say. This is a movie, and needs to be meritorious on things one likes movies for...such as being well-directed, well-acted, with a sense of ensemble, a good script, non-formulaic execution of the story. Oh, and please no Dogma lighting! Jews will wrongly find common cause with me for hating this movie because they despised Arendt. If you want to understand Arendt, read "The Banality of Evil." Nothing is to be learned or felt from this dreary procession of a hamfisted film. More's the pity as there is a story worth telling.

Chances are only the high-brow crowd will see "Hannah Arendt" in their regional art theater, not at the multiplex where films without car chases, explosions and sexy babes rarely are screened. The fury of intellectuals is hardly the stuff of popular drama. But the recent firestorm over the Rolling Stone magazine cover of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev mimics the issue Arendt brought up, namely the odd diametric quality of appearance and evil. People were outraged that Tsarnaev resembled a nice young man, someone you would love your daughter to date. Had he appeared with a turban, demonic eyes and fangs dripping blood, would that have satiated the public's taste for bad guys looking like bad guys, not rock musicians? Arendt did a similar thing covering the Eichmann trial in 1961 for the New Yorker. She subsequently wrote "Eichmann in Jerusalem", the Banality of Evil", positing that the monster was in fact, a man and a bland mediocrity at best. This, too, outraged those who wanted Eichmann to be portrayed as the devil incarnate. Recent history has proved that atrocities, whether the holocaust in Rwanda, the Newtown Massacre or other acts of horror, are committed by people we wouldn't look twice at if we met them on the street. That maybe everyone has a Heart of Darkness that can be accessed under the perfect storm of conditions. It's all a matter of choice.

"Hannah Arendt" is a German film from 4 years ago that got writer and director Margarethe von Trotta and lead actress Barbara Sukowa international acclaim (again) and awards attention as well. I personally cannot see why though. This film here that runs for not much under 2 hours is a perfect example of how a historically relevant film should not look like. The main reason is Sukowa. She gives a performance that screams awards attention is packed with over-the-top acting in the worst possible way one can imagine and full of mannerisms that make her turn entirely style over substance. I do not think I have ever seen a worse performance that garnered so much awards attention. I could mention a dozen scenes, but honestly you will know what I am talking about when you watch the film. The script is not as bad as Sukowa's performance, but it is still fairly weak I must say. Also a great example of style over substance and it totally does not do any justice to the interesting story of the Eichmann trial. In theory, Arendt's approach to the matter emphasizing Eichmann's mediocrity instead of depicting him as a true evil is an interesting background and certainly a worthy foundation for a feature film. But beyond that interesting background and a solid beginning that is luckily not about Sukowa's character for once. In terms of the rest of the film, it is almost not bearable because of how hammy the lead actress is from start to finish. So it should not come as a surprise at all that the only good thing are the original recordings from the Eichmann trial. And these can hardly be attributed to von Trotta's work here. Given her recognition in the decades before this film, I certainly have to ask the question if she has lost her skill entirely. I cannot imagine for any reason why anybody would greenlight a film with such an unbearable lead performance. Highly not recommended.

The movie starts like a thriller. A man, walking alone in the night, is suddenly kidnapped by some men in a van. The man screams. The image is dark, except for the lights of the van which hurries toward us. We understand later on that the kidnappers were Mossad agents and that the man was Adolf Eichmann. This is 1960. Hanna Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) has been living in exile in New York with her husband (Axel Milberg) for twenty years. She is a well-known professor, she and her husband are a happy couple, she is surrounded by friends. After hearing the news of Eichmann's arrest, she convinces the New Yorker to send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. The article that she ends up writing and that the New Yorker decides to publish is of course more than a mere journalist account, but a philosophical reflection on the origins of evil. Arendt's now famous theory is that Eichmann was not a monster nor an anti-Semite, but just a cog in the Nazis' infernal machine, unable to think and to feel empathy. This idea is what she called the banality of evil. In her essay, Arendt also denounces the collaboration of some Jews with the Nazis. Of course those ideas create a scandal among the American intelligentsia and the Jewish community around the world. People attack her without trying to understand her, and of course, as it is often the case, without even reading her. How can a Jew who experienced the concentration camps put herself in a nazi's shoes to try to explain his crimes? How can a Jew dare criticize other Jews? Many of her friends break off their relations with her. One of them, on his deathbed, asks her "don't you love your people?" and she answers that she can't love a people, she only loves her friends. Two visions conflict with each other, communitarianism against freedom of thought. The film is interesting in the way it shows this free thinking at work. Hanna Arendt, wonderfully played by Barbara Sukowa, is shown smoking in her apartment, sitting at her desk or in a sofa, lying on a couch, standing at the window. She is shown writing and thinking, and it's never boring. You can criticize the film for many things, but not for its dullness. You can criticize Margarethe von Trotta's academic filmmaking, especially when she uses flashbacks to evoke Arendt's relationship with Heidegger. You can criticize her partial perspective. She never questions her character, she makes Arendt a heroin, a sort of Robin Hood fighting for truth. Arendt's character is far from bland, but she has no contradictions, no gray areas. Except for the final speech to her students, Arendt's work is not really tackled, but this is not a film about a philosophical work, it is a mainstream film about a woman that von Trotta wants us to like. And we do. The film is a tribute. Von Trotta intelligently treats the historical dimension by inserting archive images of the trial. You see Eichmann in his glass cage, answering the judges' questions. You also see survivors testifying, and some Jews trying to justify themselves. Thus, except for one superfluous scene, the trial is not re-enacted, and this is for the best, because fiction cannot replace already existing images. You can criticize the film for its didactism, or praise it for its informative qualities. You can't criticize the film for its lack of accuracy, because it is a portrait, and, like every biography, it is biased. Here, the biography is almost a hagiography, but a hagiography that is open and clear in its intentions.

Hannah Arendt, Jewish-German philosopher and veteran from a Nazi camp she escaped from. She lives in New York when the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem is on and she decides to go there, to report for New Yorker. She gets confirmation in her theory of banality in evil, when she sees Eichmann and writes about it. What's worse is that she also blames Jewish leaders. They have guilt too, since they let themselves be forced into the Holocaust organization. Of course there's outrage, but in a couple of scenes you find splendid defense for free speech and free thought. A film with a female philosopher as hero, just talking, is rare.