I would like to comment further on an observation I made in the previous post. In “The banality of evil” I traced a connection between how the presence of the cigarette is deployed in the movie and the act of thinking that engulfs Hannah Arendt in many of the film’s scenes. I claimed that the changing presence of the cigarette in the scenes materializes, namely grants sensuous texture to act of thinking, which is, arguably, a challenge for evocative representation, let alone dramatization.
I stressed the point that von Trotta decides against cinematic shortcuts such as the reliance on narrative (dialogue or voiceover) or suggestions or allusions for the representation of her thinking process. Both the camera’s gaze and montage choices do not undercut the integrity of the numerous shots in which Hannah Arendt is situated thinking, enveloped in silence, solitude, and cigarette smoke.
In the few paragraphs that address this point, I made a conscious effort to avoid associating metaphorically the cinematic use of the cigarettes with the dramatization of her thinking. The cigarette is not deployed, I interpret, to stand as a metaphor of HA’s acts of thinking. The former does not stand particularly for the universality of the latter; the former does not pull down to concrete reality the bodiless abstraction of the latter. Because metaphors recreate a parallel relation of assumed equality. The viability of the assumed equality between the parts of the metaphor hinges on content superseding form. The form of the metaphor never changes so that the contents or substances of the metaphor assume center stage. On the other hand, and bearing a bit of a circular logic, it is precisely the effacement of form that permits the assumption of equality between the parts of the metaphor that enables the metaphor to function as such.
At the same time, it is the flattened two-part form of the metaphor that concedes that the content be compressed into an inseparable two-part one. The metaphor is a tricky rhetorical operation, whose inner makings deserve more carefully and rigorously laid out thoughts than the ones I am assembling here. For now, I end with the following brief reflections:
I am usually skeptical of the unduly trusted explicative prowess of the metaphors as they too quickly satisfy, at least in appearance, the need for clarity and concreteness. It seems to me that the metaphor succeeds more intrepidly when it fails, precisely when the two parts of the metaphor cannot be collapsed or the two parts surrender to the unshackling that inhabits the metaphor’s structure. Upon the failure of the metaphor to operate conventionally, a gap or opening emerges whereby the differences between the two parts remain not only evident but also relevant. The parts engage in inexact relations of similarity and dissimilarity, and in that inexactitude a balance rises that allows for the metaphor to remain an irreducible rhetorical operation. To think of the metaphor as the rhetorical way to ground abstract concepts in concrete reality means to hardly think of the metaphor at all.
Having said this, I still do not interpret the presence of the cigarette in the film as a metaphor for Hannah Arendt’s thinking. What, then?
Realism 