January 18–May 4, 2008

 

E Y A L   S I V A N   b. Haifa, Israel, 1964

The Holocaust, Nazi atrocity, and the adjudication of guilt and responsibility are the principal issues addressed in Rony Baumann and Eyal Sivan's film, The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1999). In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer responsible for coordinating the deportation of Jews from German-occupied parts of Europe to death camps, was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents and flown to Jerusalem, where he was tried for crimes against humanity. Sivan's film, comprised entirely of footage shot during the sensational trial, raises a number of vexing issues, the most significant of which is the equality of the relationship between the testimony of witnesses and survivors and Eichmann’s denial of responsibility. In The Specialist, Sivan uses a series of editorial ruptures to deny the film chronological coherence, setting up a confrontation between the witnesses and the defendant. These ruptures establish a distance from the traumatic emotional responses that images of the Holocaust usually elicit, particularly among survivors, and instead focus attention on the ordinariness of perpetrators like Eichmann, whose very innocuousness prompted the philosopher Hannah Arendt to coin the memorable phrase "the banality of evil." Wielding the sharp knife of deconstruction, Sivan restructures the chronology of the trial, presenting it out of sequence and thus denying the logic of archival linearity and narrative continuity. The filmmaker's reshaping of the event through a series of editing choices lends drama to the otherwise laborious process of a judicial proceeding.

 

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