Director: Margarethe von Trotta
Talent: Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Janet McTeer, Julia Jentsch
Release Date: 27th September 2013
Jacques Derrida once declared that, despite his interest in the sex lives of philosophers, he had no intention of ‘making a porno film about Hegel or Heidegger’. Evidently Margarethe von Trotta has no such intention either. Her account of political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s controversial report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann is a tasteful affair, more or less. Yet with a decorously cut flashback scene showing Herr Heidegger ascending to young Arendt’s room, then descending to young Arendt’s knees, this is probably the closest we will come to such niche erotica for some time. Back on his feet, Heidegger famously suggested that Aristotle’s biography should be: ‘He was born, he thought, and he died.’ No dictum reveals as starkly the essential absurdity of a biopic like this. Hannah Arendt praises its subject for virtues its form necessarily disowns. Hannah doesn’t ‘beat her breast about her own forced exile,’ says the character of Mary McCarthy, but through her and many others, Hannah Arendt does. The film cannot give us abstraction, and what’s left, as Heidegger continued, is pure anecdote.
