Not thinking is not the same as not having empathy: Hannah Arendt
First Screening. Kino Lorber Streaming. My bedroom. First of all, I'd like to warn everyone that when you click on the "Kino Lorber" logo on your Amazon screen, that it auto enrolls you into a 7 day free trial before it charges you 14.99 a month. And to that I say fuck off, Amazon you evil, evil corporation! I only caught it when I was looking for my subscriptions to bath salts, CBD, and astroglide.
This had a fairly accurate breakdown, which was thorough but not very entertaining. I'm not sure how you're going to square that circle. Arendtian Thought isn't really couched in terms that cinema can easily convey. I find it very frustrating that people cannot understand, or explain, the difference between Arendt's idea of Thinking and the psychological idea of having a lack of empathy. They are two separate ideas. I think I've also reached the end of my tether with people who think Arendt was a historian recording the Shoah, and thus any mistakes she made means she must be tarred and feathered.
Specifically, there are historians and philosophers in this doc which accuse her of ignoring that although some Jews conspired with the Nazis to sacrifice their community in the hope of saving lives, the majority of the Jews did not participate. First, Arendt wasn't making a sweeping judgement of all of Europe. If you look at Vichy France, the local cops had to do the dirty work because conscientious Christians were hiding Jews with remarkable success. If you look at Hungry... well you get the reverse. Arendt calls this collaboration "the darkest part of the whole dark story" and boy... wow. That fucking pissed off the elitists. As if that wasn't the darkest part. I mean, what could be WORSE than dying in a gas chamber with 749 of your closest friends and family? Oh.. Let me take a guess here. Ummm.... if I were sent here by my religious leadership... yeah, that would suck just a tiny bit worse. Especially if you live in America and found out you have no relatives anymore because the Judenrat in your hometown decided to cut a deal.
This fucked up morality play doesn't shift any blame away from the Nazis, and though Arendt's tone in Chapter 7 of her work "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is thoroughly angry, she herself doesn't blame the dead for murdering themselves. This very notion is absurd! And yet here are reputable people contesting her idea that collaboration makes genocide worse as if that's a fucking surprise! To make it more morose, one of these talking heads actually says well she's acting like it was happening all over Europe and it wasn't. It was just in a few places... as if that made it any better? Can you imagine a historian delivering a paper at conference with the arguement: "Hey, now, listen, I know it's bad losing four hundred thousand Jews because a few hundred cut deal with department 4BIV, but you know... it's not actually THAT bad. I mean, come on!"
Nuance being the most difficult part of history (Goebbels loved his kids, etc.) it must be the most difficult element to convey in the medium of film. Arendt wasn't perfect, but she also didn't choose ideological sides. As this doc makes clear, she was furious at the State of Israel for a number of actions that simply did not help themselves in the long run and as we know - ALL JEWS in the world HAVE to answer for the crimes of Israel so it's not quite kosher. The Eichmann Trial itself was a farce - just like Arendt said. That had no bearing on whether Eichmann was guilty. He was guilty as HELL! Just like Arendt said.
I look forward to any documentary on Arendt, but it would be nice if someone spent more time on her other ideas (Right of Nations, Totalitarian Equality, etc.) but again, I don't know how you're going to present it in cinema form and keep people awake.
For those who are wishing to learn, I highly advising listening to Roger Berkowitz' Reading Hannah Arendt Podcast from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. You can go chapter by chapter to grasp her ideas. I would recommend that before barging through Origins of Totalitarianism. It worked for me.