Some forty years after the publication of Hannah Arendt's controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the Israeli-born filmmaker Eyal Sivan released his documentary film The Specialist, explicitly referring to Arendt's work. Sivan took archive footage filmed in 1961, during the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and edited it to present a cinematic articulation of Arendt's book. The film discusses the fundamental flaws in the way the trial was conducted as well as the nature of Eichmann's crimes. This article analyzes Sivan's use of narrative, editing, visual, and auditory stylistic devices to expose the way the trial was used by the Zionist movement and to challenge its active role within Zionist collective memory.
In Arendt's view, the basic fault of the trial was its ideological oversight of the horrifying essence of Eichmann's crime. She claims that his main motivation was not pure antisemitism, but a mixture of obedience, dullness, and a desire to satisfy his supervisors — a mode of thought illustrated by Eichmann's surprising declaration that "he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts." Arendt also blames Ben-Gurion for "invisibly stage-managing the proceedings," seeking to design the trial as a show-trial in which antisemitism as a whole would be brought to justice.
Sivan, an Israeli filmmaker living in Paris known for his moral critique of Zionist ideology, explicitly cites Arendt's book as a source of inspiration in the credits of The Specialist. The film disassembles the conventional narrative structure and chronology of the trial: it opens with the seventh session and concludes with a fragment from session 95 out of 121, with sessions intercut out of order throughout. Sivan was blamed by Hillel Tryster, director of Steven Spielberg's Jewish Film Archive, for "fraud, forgery and falsification" due to a series of editorial distortions — among them the artificial juxtaposition of testimony, the insertion of audience laughter, and the elliptical editing of Pinhas Freudiger's testimony. Regardless of the moral aspects of these choices, it is clear that Sivan intentionally denies the original order of the trial.
The last stages of the trial — the pronouncement of judgment and the death sentence — are completely absent from the film, a "relinquishing" of dramatic climaxes that is certainly not accidental: Sivan manifests his resistance to the logic that the Zionist concept of the trial is based upon. The film's opening credits present the names of the trial's key figures the way movie stars' names are presented beside their roles, concluding with "In Film by Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan" — as if Eichmann, the attorneys, and the judges all belonged to Sivan's cast.
Sivan cinematically portrays Eichmann as a pedantic clerk whose obsession with detail is a threatening normality. The pronouncement of the death sentence and the execution are replaced with a fragment from his cross-examination; the film ends with an image of Eichmann sitting in his glass booth while his surroundings are gradually erased, the booth table turning into a desk. By avoiding a reminder of Eichmann's execution as the film's final element, Sivan denies the Zionist lesson of this affair, in the spirit of Arendt's critique.
The Specialist was created within the cultural post-Zionist climate of the last two decades of the 20th century. In his earlier film Izkor: Slaves of Memory (1991), Sivan examined how the Zionist education system immerses its trainees in an overflow of collective memory; in The Specialist he turns his criticism to a still more central element of that memory. In his later film Route 181 (2004), made with Michel Khleifi, he raises the possibility that a current incarnation of banal evil can be found in the Israeli army itself — a comparison that, in Sivan's view, is inseparable from his refusal to accept that the universal essence of Eichmann's crimes should remain the exclusive property of the accusers.
Source : Gal Raz — Shofar, 22.09.2005