How to convey on film the ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt? This drama concentrates on the early 1960s when Arendt—a Jew who fled Germany in 1933—was commissioned by the New Yorker to cover the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann. Attempting to reconcile what she perceived as the shocking mediocrity of the man with his monstrous deeds, she identified the “banality of evil.” Her analytical appraisal of the trial provoked a vitriolic row among intellectuals, many of them Jewish, who accused her of lacking sympathy.
Hannah Arendt can’t altogether avoid the snares of the biopic—expository dialogue about her theories or early relationship with Heidegger, for example—but Barbara Sukowa’s impassioned portrayal drives home both predicament and argument. She and director/writer Margarethe von Trotta worked decades ago with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on films where the personal and political entwined. Here, as New York intellectuals in smoky apartments debate freedom, action, judgment and humanity, a biopic seems strangely appropriate.
Barbara Sukowa's Hannah Arendt is on release from 27th September
Hannah Arendt
The passion that binds the personal and the political
September 12, 2013
