The Specialist
The Specialist (1999) This reconstructs the 1961 Adolph Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem. Eichmann played an important role in organising the deportation of European Jews into the annihilation camps. The trial filmed of an American team, includes recently released news and documentary footage. Director Eyal Sivan meshes this original film footage of the trial by with narrative strategies of the courtroom drama. The result is a dramatic focus on Adolf Eichmann and the Israeli prosecutor Hausner, with the powerful witness testimonies treated marginally.
Sivan is guided by Haannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. While Arendt seeks to analyse the specific structure of a “banality of the evil,” Sivan accents the absurdity of Eichmann in the trial. This can lead to a minimization of Eichmann’s personal guilt and the ongoing necessity to remember the Holocaust. A tendency of the documentary to relate Eichmann’s “banality of the evil” to current situations, including bureaucratisation or globalisation, also contributes to this possible minimization.
Tobias Ebbrecht, Film and Television Academy ‘Konrad Wolf”, mediacritique@web.de
