海角大神

鈥淰ita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt鈥� is a documentary about the alternately celebrated and reviled German-born philosopher who gave us the catchphrase 鈥渢he banality of evil.鈥� She was referring to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, chief enabler of the Holocaust, whose 1961 trial she wrote up in a series of New Yorker magazine articles that became the book 鈥淓ichmann in Jerusalem.鈥� The film, directed by Ada Ushpiz, mostly focuses on Arendt鈥檚 take on the trial and its aftermath, and it features extensive footage of her, mostly from a 1964 German TV interview.

Ushpiz is careful to include naysayers along with supporters of Arendt, but the core of her contention 鈥� that Eichmann was essentially a cog in a totalitarian regime and therefore, in a sense, ghoulishly insignificant 鈥� is still a flashpoint for controversy. I have always found Arendt鈥檚 attempts to intellectualize horror insufficiently empathetic, and this film does nothing to alter my view,聽best expressed by Cynthia Ozick in her essay聽鈥淟ove and Levity at Auschwitz,鈥� where she writes: 鈥淎rendt, so proudly聽sealed in intellect that nothing could penetrate the armor of her synthesis,聽ended less in condemnation than mitigation 鈥� her neutered Eichmann is a聽weak-kneed pharaoh, scarcely worth all those plagues. History as comedy聽has a parallel effect: it trivializes the unconscionable. The blood the clown聽spills is always ketchup.鈥� Grade: B (Unrated.)