Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.

Von Trotta seems to borrow some of her subject’s haughty disdain for compromise in a serviceable script that does the job of telling us who Hannah Arendt was like a good pair of solid, gray walking shoes; there’s nothing fancy or modern to distract from the portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the century.

The rare film that flows from a wellspring of ideas.

Barbara Sukowa's performance in the title role is the kind that reverberates long after the screen goes black.

It’s involving, as biopics go, but the shattering debates that still swirl around Arendt’s view of the Holocaust are relegated to walk-ons.

This is a formal and pedagogic production, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Von Trotta’s Arendt biopic feels like a movie stuck in another era, stolid and rote, more of an outline for a dramatic treatment than the real thing.

Finally caught up with Margarethe von Trotta's absolutely wonderful HANNAH ARENDT. Anchored by a perfect performance from Barbara Sukowa, HANNAH ARENDT is a truly rare accomplishment--a film that seamlessly mingles the personal and professional while totally zeroing in on Arendt's philosophical conceptions. So many films about artists, great thinkers have failed in capturing the human being behind the art or in the opposite direction, ignoring the philosophy to depict the personal only. In HANNAH ARENDT all is combined magnificently, providing a 360 degree view of a truly great human being and showing us how the personal, political, and professional are all combined.

I've only read one book by Hannah Arendt -- very cerebral, needless to say. It's fascinating to see a side of her that also touches on her warmth and her marriage and her friendships. Fascinating, also, in this time of the 24-hour news cycle, to think about her take on "the banality of evil" as personified by Eichmann, and the complexity of trying to explain that to people who demanded a one-dimensional portrait of a monster. Barbara Sukowa -- here middle-aged, dowdy and in the ugliest of '60s wardrobes -- gives a performance of great subtlety and humanity. A thought-provoking film.

(Mauro Lanari) The Milgram experiment was a social psychology experiment conducted at Yale in July 1961, three months after the trial in Jerusalem of **** war criminal Adolf Eichmann began. Stanley Milgram conceived the experiment as an attempt to answer the question: "Is it possible that Eichmann and his millions of accomplices were simply carrying out orders?" The answer that emerged is articulated in pyramidal, hierarchical, organizational form: as long as one is subjected to some authoritarian figure, one delegates the moral responsibility of the order, except for that 37% to whom in '86 Peter Gabriel dedicated a song from the album "So", "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)"; the gregarious syndrome of the most obeys regardless, so it is enough to behead the decision makers, the ruling class, the intellectual elite of the vanquished, just as the winners took care to do in the farce trial of Nuremberg, and replace / substitute them with the newcomers. It was proved that Eichmann fell into this second category and therefore was sentenced to death by hanging. In the book of '63, Arendt does not apply such a distinction and limits herself to coining the label "the banality of evil", not facing the ingenuity highlighted by those who knew how to conceive, organize and command that evil. The film **** because it never mentions any of this.

Cette émigrée juive aux Etats-Unis est une théoricienne du mal et notamment du mal **** qui a provoqué l'holocauste ; elle a tenté de comprendre et d'expliquer le comportement d'Eichmann, impliqué dans la déportation et le massacre d'innombrables Juifs pendant la guerre et ses travaux ont suscité une certaine indignation sans doute parce qu'elle n'avait pas sorti son pupitre-hommage et brûlé suffisamment de cierges. Et surtout parce qu'elle a dit que les Juifs déportés auraient dû davantage résister... et qu'elle a mis en cause le comportement de certains (Juifs). Tollé général. Mais je schématise. On peut très bien aller sur la page wiki ou se référer à moult documentaires sur le procès Eichmann en Israel et se passer totalement de ce film parfaitement inutile, barbant et rasoir et qui n'apporte strictement rien, à part servir de somnifère très vaguement audio-visuel mais, reconnaissons-le, d'une redoutable efficacité pour pioncer et se faire chier, brasser du vide et enfoncer des portes ouvertes. Il ne s'agit même pas d'un "bon" documentaire aussi scolaire et bas du front fût-il (et futil soit-il)) et les deux plombes ne sont qu'un courant d'air tiède au cours duquel une mamie avec un accent allemand à couper au couteau s'égosille en anglais et déblatère ses théories abstraites sur la mécanique du génocide. Ni fait ni à faire donc.