Hannah Arendt (2012)

This film helped me to forget that it was a film. Subtle, intelligent but mostly telling a story imperative to the 21st century. By making links throughout Arendt's personal life and development as not only one of 20th century's most brilliant thinkers and philosophers but a sentient passionate and moral woman, juxtaposed with her work—and the aftermath of—her New Yorker articles on the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt, without making such a projection, articulates what this current era of humanity suffers from most: "The banality of evil". The film brings this point into sharp focus without as much saying this is what we need, but the timeliness of it is most certainly intentional.

This film also beautifully, and again subtly, captures the state-of-mind of an era: One of calcified righteousness among others who cherished clarity of mind, goodness and intelligence, and a style of humor and affection from which those things flowed freely.

See the film to understand exactly what all this means and why Arendt's topic of the "banality of evil" is so important for today's crises facing humanity.

Fmovies: I didn't know an awful lot about philosopher Hannah Arendt before I saw this movie. Now I know a lot more about her, and about the way she thinks. After seeing the film, I have even read some articles about her work.

If that's what director Margarethe von Trotta had in mind when making this film, she succeeded. Her film documents an important chapter in the story of Arendt's life: her articles about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the ensuing tsunami of negative reactions. The reason for those negative reactions was the way Arendt regarded Eichmann: not as a monster, but as a man 'incapable of thinking', a dimwit who just followed orders. This fitted her theory of 'the banality of evil': the worst kinds of evil are often the result of not thinking for oneself.

Veteran actress Barbara Sukowa portrays Arendt as a difficult and complex woman, who is a brilliant philosopher but also stubborn, arrogant and single-minded. In one scene, we see her lying on a couch, when the phone rings. On the other end of the line is her editor, who faces a deadline and asks if she is making progress with the articles. 'Of course I'm working hard, and it would be nice if I could continue working instead of chatting on the phone', she answers. After that, she returns to the couch, lies down and continues smoking her cigarette.

Sometimes it seems that Arendt is incapable of feeling, just as Eichmann is incapable of thinking. Even when her best friends turn away from her, she continues insulting them by telling them 'she doesn't love the Jewish people'. She means it in a philosophical way - you can't love a people the way you love individuals. But nevertheless, it comes across as cold-hearted and insensitive.

Arendt is clearly an interesting person. But that doesn't make 'Hannah Arendt' an interesting film. From a cinematographic point of view, the movie doesn't have much to offer. It's a rather straightforward account of this episode in Arendt's life. The only thing that adds a little depth to the film are the flashbacks of the romantic affair she had with her teacher, the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger, who sympathized with the Nazis. The film suggests that this affair influenced the way she regarded Nazis such as Eichmann, but doesn't make this explicit. In my view, the film is interesting as a history lesson about this remarkable woman, but not as a great cinematographic experience.

What is the role of an intellectual in an increasingly anti-intellectual world? In a world of uncontrolled and under-analyzed displays of emotion, room for an intellectual, even more so for a political philosopher, is getting smaller and smaller. Hannah Arendt's thesis about banality of evil stirred the world. Perhaps because it is more terrifying to see the potential for evil in benign looking individuals than in larger than life monsters. It seems almost that we are more comfortable with childhood ogres that are hiding under our beds. If evil could be anywhere or present in anybody, can we ever be safe? Brilliant film-making, a taught provoking masterpiece in unthinkable times.

Hannah Arendt fmovies. Hanna Arendt is a biopic of the homonymous German philosopher focusing on her coverage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the outrage that her articles on it ensued.

As a historical document, the movie is gripping and mostly clear (though some lines of the discussions of her with her friends are a bit unclear) to laymen. I, for one, had never heard of Arendt and the 'banality of evil' before, but I believe that now I'd be able to talk about her thoughts with making a fool out of myself. For that, I thank the film.

Though, on a movie-making viewpoint, it is a letdown. The flow of the film is pretty odd, with leaps in time and space (eg. suddenly she is in Israel), and the efforts to use transition scenes are pretty untimely. The dialogs aren't the best either, with strange remarks here and there, and philosophic remarks not everyone could grasp.

Hannah Arendt is much more of a history and philosophy class, than a great movie. Though, it deserves a bit of appreciation for successfully exposing a great woman's thoughts to a new generation.

Hannah Arendt (2012) is a movie co-written and directed by the outstanding German director Margarethe von Trotta.

The film stars Barbara Sukowa as Arendt, who was one of he leading intellectual thinkers of the 20th Century. Arendt's history reads more like fiction than non-fiction. As discussed in the movie, she studied in Germany under the great philosopher Heidegger, was imprisoned in a Nazi internment camp in France, from which she escaped, came to the U.S., and taught at some of the finest universities in our country.

The movie concentrates on the furor that arose after Arendt wrote about the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. (These articles were later published as a book.) Arendt brought forth her theory of the banality of evil in these articles. Her point was that an evil person like Eichmann was not a monster, but rather a person who has renounced his ability to think, and therefore has renounced his status as a human being.

Arendt believed that Jews who accepted a modicum of authority from the Germans contributed to the Holocaust, because without the Jewish leaders to maintain order, there would have been more chaos and less killing of Jews.

This latter belief made people furious, because it suggested that the Jews were partially responsible for their own fate. This is hard enough to hear now. You can imagine how it was received in 1961, less than 20 years after the Holocaust.

One weakness of the film is that the script suggests that "everyone" was talking about Arendt's writing. Then, as now, the intellectuals of the Upper West Side of Manhattan did not represent a true sample of the U.S. population. Many people were aware of the Eichmann trial, but Arendt's writings passed unnoticed by most people.

Another weakness is that characters in Arendt's life are introduced once, and then never again. If you miss the names the first time, you'll just have to live without knowing who was whom. That's not so bad, because you can accept Barbara Sukowa as Arendt. Everyone else in the film revolves around her.

If you're interested in the Holocaust and in 20th Century philosophy, the film is a must. Even if those topics aren't important to you, the movie is compelling as a study in human behavior and human interactions. We saw the film at the Rochester Jewish Community Center as part of terrific Rochester Jewish Film Festival. If it's available on DVD or at another festival, I recommend that you see it.

Although I was not familiar with the name "Hannah Arendt," I was certainly familiar with the phrase "banality of evil" that Arendt coined. However, "banality of evil" is not the phrase she used. The full phrase is "the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil." Because, unlike the claims of many accusers who didn't fully understand her, Arendt didn't see a simple bureaucrat in Eichmann during his 1960 trial in Israel. She saw a truly evil man who "spoke like a bureaucrat." Her point being that Eichmann did not speak or seem to think like a genocidal maniac yet he acted like one nevertheless. That is evil cloaked in the banal. This movie revolves around the years of Arendt's life, 1960 to 1963, when she was formulating these ideas and in that, I think the movie probably has it right.

All that said, and these are certainly ideas worth mulling over, this is a film for ideas and for philosophy buffs, not for film buffs. Why do I say this? Because this movie is slow, at least for American audiences. The beginning is confusing. We see a woman in New York but we don't know the date. She speaks German. We see a man get off of a bus heading to "Victoria" in the middle of nowhere. He is promptly kidnapped. We don't know when or where. Eventually, we learn the kidnapped man is Adolph Eichmann who is nabbed by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960. Much of the movie unfolds slowly. This is a film about thinking. It is not about doing much or feeling much. It is an intellectual film.

There's one semi-action scene in the film where a 1950s vehicle corners Arendt on the road where she is walking. Israeli secret agents pour out of the car and threaten Arendt, trying to prevent her from publishing her book about Eichmann. Based on someone knowledgeable, Professor Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College in New York, it appears this scene was invented out of whole cloth to try to give the film at least some suspense. But that's not what this film is about.

It's about thinking and it's about the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil and how Hannah Arendt was the first to identify this 20th-century pathology of the human psyche.

Thanks to the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose for showing this film.