In the controversy over whether director Eyal Sivan should receive public funding, the left has been for, the right against. My voice belongs to neither; it is a non-Zionist one of only partly Jewish ancestry and comes to you from Berlin. My information comes from first-hand knowledge. Sivan's dishonesty is a compelling reason to exclude him from public funding. Sivan now plays the victim, falsely denying that he has endorsed calls for anti-Israel boycotts. Recently, in London, he could be seen emphasizing with thumping hand that disrespect of international law by Israel "gives us the permission to question the right of Israel to exist!"
My exposure of the forgeries in Sivan's 1999 film "The Specialist" became widely known in early 2005, just after I left my position as Director of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, which, with the State Archive, preserved the Eichmann trial videos Sivan manipulated for his film (Sivan's claim that he preserved them is false). The film is bad enough; more damning of Sivan's integrity are his statements about it.
In the film itself, Sivan removes anything non-bureaucratic from Eichmann's character and villifies Prosecutor Gideon Hausner. How does Sivan succeed in "directing" characters who were videoed before his birth? He shapes their performances by replacing anything that doesn't match what he wants to show with something that does, regardless of original context. The whole film is like this and its reviews confirm that he fooled everybody. He even combined a question intended for one witness with a reaction from another who wasn't asked it. "The Specialist" is fiction, not documentary; it depicts events that did not take place.
After his unmasking, Sivan, who had till then spoken vaguely and obscurely about the liberties he'd taken in his editing, admitted that most allegations were true. But though all were, in fact, true, he continued to deny some. The most extreme case was one in which he showed witness Pinchas Freudiger describing a meeting with Eichmann as "reassuring." I revealed that Freudiger had actually described Eichmann as jack-booted, uniformed, armed and bellowing and that Sivan had replaced this with a description of a meeting without Eichmann. Sivan's reaction: "an outright lie." In Germany, a comparison was broadcast and the Adolf-Grimme-Institut, which had awarded him its prestigious prize, announced it would investigate whether the prize should be revoked.
Sivan has spun fantastic tales of the Spielberg Archive's neglect of the original tapes. He says the originals were allowed to deteriorate so badly that he had to do expensive digital enhancement. If one actually compares, one sees many reflections in the original, which is of a quality largely indistinguishable from that of "The Specialist." This illustrates how Sivan has been believed, not in spite of the scope of his deception, but because of it.
My attack is not political and Sivan cannot claim artistic immunity from it. He has been selling a product, partially plagiarized, for which he makes fraudulent claims. According to HU geography professor Ruth Kark, Sivan's claim that Yad Vashem was built on the site of an Arab village destroyed in 1948 is "nonsense." Sivan should not be judged for his politics, but for his actions, and this would be a just point in time for the full truth about them to emerge.
Source : R.S.H. Tryster, 25.09.2007