NZIFF Review: ‘Hannah Arendt’

Margarethe von Trotta’s film-making career has spanned four decades. In that time she made herself a master of compelling academic cinema. Her films tend to be philosophical, asking the audience to engage their brains rather than just sit back and absorb narrative and imagery.

Hannah Arendt continues this trend.

Not a straightforward bio-pic of a startling woman, the film only briefly mentions Arendt’s past as a German Jew forced into exile by the Nazis’ rise to power. Now living happily in the US, she makes a living as a university lecturer. When the New Yorker magazine asks her to travel to Israel to cover the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, she jumps at the chance.

During the trial Hannah is struck by how ordinary Eichmann is, and by his insistence that he was only following orders and that he was not responsible for the deaths he caused. By the time she writes the piece, these things have coalesced in her mind. The finished article is a treatise about the nature of evil and how, thanks to their own complacency, the Jewish people were complicit in their fate.

Obviously Jewish survivors were not happy with her coverage and Arendt finds herself the object of hatred and vilification – even from her closest friends. But she refuses to bow to their pressure, even scheduling a public lecture to defend herself when the university suggests she might want to give up teaching.

The film stays almost entirely in the Eichmann timeframe, only leaving for a few brief flashbacks to the affair Arendt had as a young woman with the philosopher Heidegger. These scenes serve to underline Hannah’s curiosity and intellectualism.

Underlying Von Trotta’s film is a question about human motivation. Hannah questions it in her article by holding everyone responsible for the rise of the Nazis. And in turn Von Trotta questions it by showing how the almost universal misinterpretation of Hannah’s work created an outpouring of emotional responses that led to death threats from even those close to Arendt.

Intelligent, clever and much deeper than it may first appear, Hannah Arendt is a very relevant film. Everyone should see it before deciding to hop onto any popular bandwagon.

6/10

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