Hannah Arendt

Arendt vs. "the banality of evil"
"Hannah Arendt" (2012 release from Germany; 109 min.) is NOT a biopic of the German "political theorist" Hannah Arendt. Instead, it brings us the story surrounding Hannah Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) in 1961 when she is hired by the New Yorker Magazine to cover the trial in Jerusalem of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was famously abducted by the Israeli secret police in Buenos Aires to stand trial for his crimes/atrocities against the Jews. Arendt soon creates a controversy within her circle of friends, and later, when her articles are published, within the Jewish community at large, with her controversial, yet misunderstood, views on the trial. It was in those articles that Arendt coined the now famous term "the banality of evil".

Several comments: this is another historical drama, say along the lines of the recent "Emperor" movie. But there are differences. First, there is the amazing performance of Barbara Sukowa in the title role. She is simply outstanding. Second,...
A Movie about Hannah Arendt
Making a film about a philosopher presents challenges. Philosophers and the life of reflection are internalized and often require patience and discipline to understand. Movies for a wide audience tend to depend on action. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa in the title role, "Hannah Arendt" has the famous German-Jewish émigré philosopher as its subject. If understandably slow in places, "Hannah Arendt" is worthwhile. The movie played in an independent theater in Washington, D.C. to appreciative audiences. It is valuable that it will soon available and accessible on DVD, and that the film is now available for review and discussion here on Amazon. The movie is in part in English and in part in German, with subtitles.

Hannah Arendt (1906 -- 1975) studied philosophy in Germany and wrote her dissertation (on St. Augustine) under Karl Jaspers. She became an American citizen in 1950, and taught and wrote widely. In 1961, Arendt covered...
Expecting the exceptional.
I'm eager to see this. When I was much younger and still very impressionable, I read Hannah Arendt's final work The Life of the Mind (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2) which certainly made impressions that stayed with me, which opened, lured me to, many doors to so much more. In "The Life ..." she further examined, explored her famous phrase "The banality of evil": banality she called the absence of thought, and thought she called conversations in the head aided by imagination or images present in the mind but not to the senses. She provoked in my head conversations still going.

Von Trotta's film did not make it to the remote hinterlands where I dwell, and public television did not see fit to broadcast it. There was a time when foreign films and mini-series such as Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (The Criterion Collection) were...
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