BRATTLEBORO — In Hannah Arendt, we see the world through the eyes of those who have witnessed atrocities beyond imagination and now must find a way to learn from experience. In The Act of Killing, we are asked to identify directly with the perpetrators of similar horrors. In both films, we are asked to see ourselves in the most heinous of humans.
Margarethe von Trotta's drama, with Barbara Sukowa playing the title character, centers on the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel.
Arendt, a Jewish émigré to the United States who was already a bête-noir intellectual for her relationship with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, takes an assignment for The New Yorker to write about it.
The story is told through her personal drama as she goes to Israel, formulates her thesis, and then faces almost universal condemnation for her conclusions.
Arendt sees Eichmann as pathetically human, and she is attacked for acknowledging his humanity. Additionally, she accuses Jewish leaders of complicity with the German authorities as they rounded up people for imprisonment and eventual extermination.
The central question in Hannah Arendt is whether we can afford war criminals the modicum of humanity necessary to understand their behavior.
In the film, Arendt argues that we must honestly examine the human potential for extreme cruelty so that we can form a methodology to prevent it. Seeing Eichmann within the scale of normal human behavior creates a rift with her contemporaries that nearly destroys her personal, professional, and public lives.
The New Yorker articles and the subsequent book version, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, set the stage for a battle of ideas still being carried out in the public arena.
The film beautifully recreates the world of the post-war international intelligentsia in New York City in the early '60s. Though a bit stagy, the issues are freshly presented through cultured dialogue. One of the pleasures of this film is its liberal use of literary quotes to summarize the issues being debated. This homage to great thinkers of the ages places Arendt in their rarefied firmament.
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Arendt's insight into “the banality of evil” is given an even- more-upsetting spin in The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's detailed portrait of Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, two mass murderers who exterminated thousands during the anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966.
The film captures these men's effort to mythologize their history of massacres and assassinations as cinematic storytelling. The imagery they create evokes the classic Hollywood styles of gangster films as well as Cecil B. DeMille's and John Waters' campy extravaganzas.
The fact that the film gives Congo and Zulkadry an opportunity to explore their deeper feelings and to find solace in rationalizations is deeply galling, but as the story unfolds you begin to see the value in exploring their psyches and understanding the cultural and political dynamics in which they were indoctrinated.
We would prefer to see their callous, immoral behavior as alien and inhuman, but the film is redolent with their charming idiosyncrasies and their richly human personalities as they grapple with the meaning of their actions and acknowledge their mistakes.
The film exposes Congo and Zulkadry as part of a cultural framework that celebrates their bloodthirstiness within the context of a national struggle. There is still an official acceptance in Indonesia that the extermination of the “communists” was for the common good.
In one scene, a current-day talk show host interviews them as living heroes and applauds their methods of mass killing as “more humane” before reiterating the national mantra: God hates communists.
When we see the worst of human behavior within the context of a social political dynamic, it becomes harder to dismiss as pure evil.
A subtext of the film is that the U.S. government supported these anti-communist purges, which helped to usher in the Suharto government. References to the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan bring home this point.
The inescapable implication is that our society also provides a rationale for war crimes committed in the name of national security. What previously elicited revulsion for something alien becomes the nausea of self-recognition.