Hannah Arendt (film)
Hannah Arendt (Claim: Your thinking changed the world) is a German feature film by Margarethe von Trotta from 2012 with Barbara Sukowa in the role of the political theorist and journalist Hannah Arendt .
The film had its world premiere on September 11, 2012 at the 37th Toronto International Film Festival , the German premiere took place on January 8, 2013 at the Lichtburg cinema in Essen , and the German theatrical release was on January 10, 2013. In Switzerland, the film was released on January 17, 2013 January, in Austria on February 22, 2013 for the first time in the cinemas.
action
The film takes place in the years 1960 to 1964. The plot revolves around the so-called trial of Adolf Eichmann , who had become possible after in May 1960, the Mossad to in Argentina submerged Adolf Eichmann tracked down and after Israel had kidnapped. Hannah Arendt suggests that The New Yorker magazine report on the trial in Jerusalem . The editor William Shawn is enthusiastic about the offer of the thinker who is valued for political-historical analysis.
In April 1961, Hannah Arendt traveled from New York City to Jerusalem, where she met her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld again. She attends all important court hearings there, in which she meticulously records everything. The film incorporates original material into the storyline. In the course of the process, Adolf Eichmann turns out to be not a bestial monster, but a mediocre bureaucrat , which surprised Hannah Arendt. In the course of the trial she will also witness how Holocaust survivors collapse during questioning.
Through the dialogues that Hannah Arendt has with her husband Heinrich Blücher , her friend Mary McCarthy , her boyfriend Hans Jonas , her secretary Lotte Köhler and her students, the viewer is informed about her political and philosophical considerations. Looking back, there are scenes from Hannah Arendt's life in Germany before 1933 and from her relationship with Martin Heidegger .
After two years of intensive work, extensive research and many discussions, Hannah Arendt finally wrote the series of articles that had been eagerly awaited by everyone, which immediately provoked an unexpected scandal in the United States , Israel and the world. She withdraws to the country to avoid public attention. Many of her friends also criticize her severely. Above all, Hannah Arendt is accused of her allegations to the Jewish councils of having cooperated with the German authorities, her thesis of the "banality of evil" and lack of love for Jews. Her academic career appears to be jeopardized when she is urged to leave the university by leaders of her university. In an inauthentic scene invented for the film, she is pressured by agents of the Mossad during a walk in the forest to give up the publication of her planned book Eichmann in Jerusalem .
Hannah Arendt, however, remains consistent with her attitude and does not shy away from arguments. During their lectures, the lecture halls are overcrowded, the students enthusiastically listen to their analyzes and unabashed conclusions. Of the friends, only her husband Heinrich Blücher as well as Mary McCarthy and Lotte Köhler still stick with her.
production
The film is based on extensive research and discussions with acquaintances of Hannah Arendt, among them Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, Arendt's secretary for eight years, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl , most important Arendt biographer and at times her student, Jerome Kohn, Arendt's last assistant and editor of her posthumous writings, Lore Jonas, widow of Arendt's Marburg fellow students Hans Jonas , and Wally Shawn, son of The New Yorker publisher 1952–1987 William Shawn. Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart also introduced Margarethe von Trotta to Lotte Köhler, Arendt's only surviving friend and administrator of her estate. She died on March 24, 2011 at the age of 92 in New York.
Margarethe von Trotta and Pamela Katz also visited Arendt's life stations, including the house on 370 Riverside Drive in New York, Arendt's apartment at the end of her life, the house of Arendt's friend Kurt Blumenfeld in Israel and the cemetery at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson , on which Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher are buried and where Hannah Arendt had a wooden bench set up after the death of her husband to “talk” to him.
The first version of the script was available in 2004, and the financing could not be clarified until summer 2010. Margarethe von Trotta made it a condition that Hannah Arendt be played by Barbara Sukowa, because, in von Trotta's opinion, she is "the only actress I could imagine that she could show me: how someone thinks." According to the television companies BR , WDR and ARD Degeto also approved funding from the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW , the Filmförderungsanstalt , the Film Fund Luxembourg, the Israel Film Fund and the Jerusalem Film Fund.
The film was produced by Heimatfilm ( Cologne ) in coproduction with Amour Fou Luxembourg ( Ettelbrück ), MACT Productions ( Paris ) and Metro Communications ( Tel Aviv ). Shooting began on October 16, 2011, and was shot on 37 days in North Rhine-Westphalia (10 days), Jerusalem (7 days) and Luxembourg (20 days) until December 17, 2011.
The silhouette of New York comes from the production designer Volker Schaefer. Hannah Arendt's apartment on Riverside Drive in New York was recreated in a studio in Luxembourg. A former forester's house near Rieferath , an American original house, which was brought to Europe following the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 , served as Arendt's country house, to which she retired after the hostility against her. In Jerusalem, the film was shot in the original building in which the trial of Eichmann took place in 1961, a cultural center that was not a courtroom even then. Since von Trotta wanted to show the real Eichmann in order to evoke “the amazement of this man and at the same time the disgust that one feels” in the audience, archive material from the Eichmann trial was made available by the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem placed and lavishly built into the film to fill the entire screen.
The film was shot with a Red One camera in CinemaScope . Hannah Arendt is Margarethe von Trotta's first film to be produced digitally.
The film is set in German, but if the protagonists speak in English or Hebrew, these scenes are subtitled . This also applies to the original recordings taken over from the Eichmann trial, in which the participants have their say in their respective language. Trotta enforced this procedure against the rental agency because it made Hannah Arendt's linguistic emigration clear.
reception
success
In 2013, the German box office counted 464,512 visitors across Germany, making the film 72nd place among the most visited films of the year.
Reviews
“Condensed into a dynamically narrated portrait of a highly remarkable thinker, the film captivates as an exciting, personal and intellectual drama, in which the portrayal of the New York milieu of German-Jewish emigrants around 1961 is particularly convincing. Cinematically, he only 'breathes' to a certain extent; the staging is also too much committed to an internal perspective to allow a more critical distance from the main character and to make the controversies about her writings comprehensible in a differentiated manner. "
"Von Trotta's drama is great cinema: real, moving and full of admiration for a woman who went her own way and firmly believed in her own values."
“An excellent camera with equally good light work ideally focuses the faces of the protagonists in impressive settings. The cast of the characters is extraordinary: Axel Milberg, Ulrich Noethen, Michael Degen, Janet McTeer and Julia Jentsch and finally Barbara Sukowa in the role of her life with an absolutely brilliant performance as Hannah Arendt. The safe guidance of the protagonists is only one facet of the directing art of Margarethe von Trotta, who staged her most important and best film with this portrait of one of the most fascinating female figures of the 20th century. "
“ There are two main reasons why Margarete von Trotta's new film […] is absolutely worth seeing: On the one hand, she and 'Hannah Arendt' lead to films like 'Rosa Luxemburg' or ' Vision - From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen ' continues her thematic interest in influential women on a high level and manages to set a cinematic monument to an important German philosopher. On the other hand, it shows the viewer an effective antidote to banal evil: independent thinking. However, this knowledge is not placed in the lap of the viewer. He has to work it out. "
“The well-acting Sukowa / Milberg duo cannot compete with the film's weaknesses in staging and so the actors sink into the swamp of the simple and lengthy treatment of Hannah Arendt's theses. As in the similarly structured film ' The Iron Lady ', the realization remains that an above-average performance by the (main) actors alone does not guarantee a good film and that a really good biographical film simply requires more. "
“Hannah Arendt's contradictions are not only not emphasized in her filmic biography, but are also confused with the coherence of her work. One cannot even say that one lives here in a false reconciliation [sic!], Because it does not come to the point that the contradictions are somehow unfolded so that they could then be reconciled in the wrong way, but Barbara Sukowa leaves the contradictions in the first place not to. "
“As always in her portrait films ('Rosa Luxemburg', 'Hildegard von Bingen'), Margarethe von Trotta was primarily interested in the strong woman, but she has her own, very German image of her. The Eichmann trial, Jewish councils and Martin Heidegger are the themes with which Arendt's 'thinking' is portrayed as a whole. Their philosophy, their historical-political texts such as ' About the Revolution ' do not matter. "
Awards
Barbara Sukowa received the prize for best actress of the Bavarian Film Prize 2012 for her role as Hannah Arendt . For her films Hannah Arendt , Hildegard von Bingen , Rosenstrasse and Rosa Luxemburg, Margarethe von Trotta was about “female characters, their fate and the often emancipatory struggle for freedom "Self-determination and dignity, the director tells with great empathy", the honorary award awarded by the Bavarian Prime Minister . In the words of Horst Seehofer, "[she] is one of the most committed directors and filmmakers in Germany."
At the 36th Göteborg International Film Festival , where her films Hannah Arendt and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum are shown, Margarethe von Trotta received the Honorary Dragen Award as "one of the leading filmmakers of the new German cinema of the 1970s" .
Hannah Arendt was given the rating of particularly valuable by the German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) . In addition, the jury of Evangelical Film Work chose the film as film of the month January 2013 .
In addition, Hannah Arendt was nominated in six categories for the German Film Prize 2013 - Feature Films, Best Screenplay (Pam Katz, Margarethe von Trotta), Best Director (Margarethe von Trotta), Best Acting Performance - Female Leading Role (Barbara Sukowa), Best Costume Design (Frauke Firl), Best Make-up (Astrid Weber). The film won the Silver Film Award in the Best Feature Film category and Barbara Sukowa won the Best Acting Performance - Female Leading Role award .
literature
- Martin Wiebel (Ed.): Hannah Arendt. Your thinking changed the world. The book for the film by Margarethe von Trotta. Piper, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-30175-6 .
- Gerhard Scheit : Allegories of the Nation: Hannah Arendt and Zero Dark Thirty. In: sans phrase . Journal for Ideology Criticism , Issue No. 2, 2013 ISSN 2194-8860
Web links
- Hannah Arendt in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official website for the film
- Press release (PDF; 681 kB) from NFP marketing & distribution
- Material for school and extracurricular education (PDF; 6.7 MB) from grade 10/16
- Detailed analysis in the podcast "Spätfilm"
- Annette Vowinckel : Hannah Arendt in the cinema. on Zeitgeschichte-online , January 2013.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Hannah Arendt . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2012 (PDF; test number: 134 683 K).
- ↑ a b "Hannah Arendt" thrilled in Toronto. Focus Online, September 12, 2012.
- ↑ Peter Nowak : Was Hannah Arendt the Judith Butler of the early 1960s? Telepolis , December 26, 2012.
- ↑ Christiane Peitz: Erotik des Disputs. In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 8, 2013.
- ↑ a b c d Thilo Wydra: Margarethe von Trotta on Hannah Arendt - "Implementing thinking visually". Goethe Institute. V., February 2012.
- ↑ Frank Olbert: Director Margarethe von Trotta about machos in film. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, May 8, 2015.
- ^ Website of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
- ↑ KINOaktuell: What you wanted. Münster's cinema year 2013. C. Lou Lloyd, Film Info No. 4, 23. – 29. January 2014, p. 24 f.
- ↑ Hannah Arendt. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ a b German film and media evaluation: Hannah Arendt. Film info and jury statement.
- ↑ Björn Helbig: On the power of thinking. on Kino-Zeit.de.
- ^ Critique by Fabian Speitkamp , Moviereporter.de, November 7, 2012.
- ^ Joris J .: An ungrateful genre. Berliner-Filmfestivals.de, January 7, 2013.
- ↑ Anina Valle Thiele: Hannah Arendt for beginners. In: Tachles , January 11, 2013, p. 20.
- ↑ a b c Bavarian State Government: Minister of State Zeil on behalf of Prime Minister Seehofer at the 34th Bavarian Film Prize. Honorary award to director Margarethe von Trotta. ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Press release from January 18, 2013.
- ↑ Göteborg International Film Festival: Margarethe von Trotta will be visiting the festival 26-28 / 1. ( Memento from December 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Film culture center in the joint venture of Protestant journalism: The jury of Protestant film work recommends Hannah Arendt , Film of the Month January 2013. (PDF; 130 kB).
- ↑ German Film Academy e. V .: Nominations for the German Film Prize 2013. ( Memento from July 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 76 kB).
- ↑ German Film Academy e. V .: Winner of the German Film Prize 2013. ( Memento from June 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 130 kB).
- ↑ Gerhart Scheit Parataxis Heft 2, spring 2013 at sansphrase.org.
- ↑ sans phrase editorial staff, issue 2 ( memento of the original from October 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at ca-ira-net.
