Un inolvidable y necesario filme de Margarethe von Trotta (Esp | Eng)

ENG

Two days ago I published a post about the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (*), and in it he cited one of his beloved disciples, Hannah Arendt, considered the most important philosopher of the century XX, author of a thought of utmost importance about the human being, his moral, ethical, political and historical condition. I published a post about her last year, which you can see here.

But this post is not primarily about Hannah Arendt, but about the filmmaker, also German, Margarethe von Trotta , to whom I thought I would dedicate a publication taking into account her birth, on February 21, 1942, which was made in 2012 in the film about the aforementioned philosopher, the subject of this post.

Margarethe von Trotta is perhaps the most prominent German filmmaker of the second half of the 20th century to the present day, who is associated with the so-called "New German Cinema", which emerged in the 1960s and includes names such as Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders. Her films have focused on relevant female figures, as a way of addressing the issue of women and their function in society, from a broad perspective. Of the few films that I have been able to see, I highlight The German Sisters (1981), Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Hannah Arendt (2012).

The last one of hers that I was able to see is the one dedicated to the aforementioned Jewish-German philosopher, which was commercially titled in Spanish as Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil , added to the original which seemed very pertinent to me, as it could draw the attention of those who did not know this peerless woman.

What is this film about? Of the controversial vital and intellectual experience of Hannah Arendt, who we already said was of Jewish origin, of issuing her judgment regarding the motivation for the behavior of a Nazi war criminal and the "normality" of that action.

Arendt, who had already suffered because of her Jewish and intellectual status during Nazism in Germany and France, invaded by it, had resided in the United States in 1941, with her husband Heinrich Büchler. In 1961, when the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichman was captured, he proposed as a journalist to attend the trial in Jerusalem and write the respective articles for the magazine The New Yorker, which appeared gradually, and would later become the book Eichman in Jerusalem in 1963.

This would be the basic anecdote of the fictional film, with a biographical basis, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, with her script, based on Arendt's book, of course. The German director knows how to highlight the internal conflict experienced by the character, the philosopher Arendt, in relation to the immediate history of horror experienced by Jews and many others, and trying to understand what animates the mind of the criminal Eichman. The central approach that Arendt leaves in her book is the one that, with delicacy and precision, von Trotta gives us: one can exercise evil, be its main executor, and assume that only orders are followed, that the action is a result of obedience, something "normal", since one is only an administrator, a bureaucrat. The filmmaker accentuates the sense of "absence of thinking" in Eichman, since she does not reflect on what he does. It is what she calls banality of evil.

But it is also important in the film how Arendt's attitude of incomprehension, even condemnation and persecution, is maintained by other Jewish intellectuals, academics, friends, an entire society of her time.

Bringing this complex issue to our consideration, especially to those who have not read Arendt, is one of the values of von Trotta's film.

He achieves all this with one axis: the expressive and magnificent performance of the German actress Barbara Sukova, who characterizes the historical character with all the psychological depth (nervousness, anxiety, affection, doubt, etc.); to which very accurate makeup and costumes contribute. Also the intelligent use of fragments of the trial recordings, where Eichman's crosshairs play a key role, apart from other testimonies. Likewise the performances of those who play her husband, her friends and her teacher Martin Heidegger.

The photography is very clear and with appropriate use of shots, particularly those where we can appreciate the emotion of the character, often almost ataraxic. It is also worth highlighting the use of sound, manifesting as silence or the suggestive music of André Mergenthaler.