Before I say more about Hannah Arendt’s thesis, which emerged from her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), I would like to describe my and J’s response to Margarethe Von Trotta’s eponymous film.
The film makes the director’s deep admiration for Hannah Arendt clear early on. The first scenes show AH moving from one room to another in her warmly lit, intellectually furnished apartment on the Upper West Side where books coexist with wood color furniture, and silence accentuates the steady staccato of the typewriter. Far from being a hagiography, the film expresses great sympathy for the thinker without necessarily simplifying the many tensions that made her a complex, and at times difficult, person. It does present her like an intellectual heroine too ahead of her peers, who failed to understand both her critical perspective and intellectual project because, perhaps, only temporal distance could afford such peers the ability to see the Holocaust in the way HA was approaching the subject. The temporality of her book on Eichmann and the emergence of her theory of the banality of evil is at once unfortunate and inevitable (or fortunate and contingent) and from that impossible confluence emerge the reasons for her intellectual heroism: to write that which her contemporaries are not yet prepared to read or hear.
In most scenes we see her with a cigarette that gently shifts positions from her mouth to her fingers. The cigarette moves almost like an added appendage to HA’s hand. To her, smoking occurs as naturally as does thinking. Cigarettes will remain ubiquitous in the film, filling the shots with mild smoke-trails whose fragrance and warmth become almost tangible for the viewer at times. Rather than a distraction, cigarettes decorate every scene as a way to materialize the act of thinking. But the ideas that are forming prior to their typing on paper probably don’t move as gently and aimlessly as the smoke that lingers from the burning tip of her cigarette. If von Trotta faced a central conundrum at the start of the film, it may have been how film can dramatize the act of thinking.
In Hannah Arendt, the production of thought is not merely suggested, narrated, described, alluded to, or textualized. It happens, many times throughout the film. We see HA thinking while lying down and smoking. We see her sitting against the window somewhere in upstate NY, thinking while smoking. More thinking while walking and, yes, smoking. Etc. The movies does not only thematize the thoughts a brave woman living in tumultuous times, produced; but the film also takes seriously the task of dramatizing the moments in which such thoughts are generated, produced, had. Thinking is engrossing and isolating and solitary, as a briefly appearing Martin Heidegger says in the film: “Thinking is a solitary endeavor.”
Solitary, yes, but never just abstract or immaterial. The universe of eidos in which Hannah the character —and at times also the film— resides is a richly sensuous world and constantly nears a textured existence that the ever shortening presence of the cigarette illustrates so eloquently. Just as the cigarette morphs into various material permutations, the thoughts of HA move from amorphous existence to intelligible and tactile presence on the manuscript.
On a final note, for now, is that the film is far from perfect, but no less worth the viewer’s time for that reason. J felt that the acting proved inconsistent. The actress who plays HA, Barbara Sukowa, is wonderful, but the acting of the secondary characters can be less nuanced and even jarring at times. In future posts I will include a closer analysis of the film’s aesthetic composition and camera use, but to close the present post, I would like to address briefly yet another angle of how the film tackles HA’s theory of the banality of evil.
J felt that, at least insofar as the way in which the film portrays the subject matter and its context, the banality of evil does not make explicit that many historical atrocities legitimate themselves through social mechanisms deeply entrenched in basic tribalism. For him, the banality of evil, a theory ever so abstract and universal, fails to explicate that social atrocities driven by racial, cultural, and religious causes, require that one group pits itself against the dehumanized or animalized other. While I concur with some parts of his objections, I disagree with the presupposition that for being too abstract and universal, the idea of the banality of evil fails to explain concretely how so-called collective evil deeds happen in history. Universality does inherently or structurally preclude, exclude or contradict, let alone negate, historical concreteness.
Realism 