DOCUMENTARY | 1999 | 128 MN | B/W | 4:3 | o.v HEBREW, GERMAN | st ENGLISH
The Specialist is a courtroom drama painting the portrait of a zealous bureaucrat who has immense respect for the Law and hierarchy, a police official responsible of the elimination of several million people.
Inspired from Hannah Arendt's book : "Eichmann in Jerusalem, Report on the banality of evil", this incredible trial of an appallingly ordinary man, is drawn entirely on the 350 hours of rare footage recorded during the trial the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, in Jerusalem
THE SPECIALIST, PORTRAIT OF A MODERN CRIMINAL by Eyal Sivan
The Specialist is a courtroom drama painting the portrait of a zealous bureaucrat who has immense respect for the Law and hierarchy, a police official responsible of the elimination of several million people. Inspired from Hannah Arendt's book : "Eichmann in Jerusalem, Report on the banality of evil", this incredible trial of an appallingly ordinary man, is drawn entirely on the 350 hours of rare footage recorded during the trial the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, in Jerusalem.
It is a film about obedience and responsibility, drawing the portrait of an expert in problems resolving, a modern criminal.
Described as a blood-thirsty pervert, the Machiavellian liar and a serial-killer by the prosecution the accused yet appears as a quiet family man, both comic and terrifying in his banality. Although he doesn't deny the role he played in the criminal enterprise that he belonged to, he shelters behind the instructions of his superiors, his vow of allegiance and the obligation of obey orders.
He considers that his role as a mere agent, a purely administrative and logistic one, devoid of all passion, shelters him from the justice of men, even through it may not exempt him from all responsibility.
Intoxicated on the dizziness of his own powerlessness, the accused describes himself as "a drop in the ocean, an instrument in the hands of superior forces". If he hadn't done it, he says, someone else would have done it instead.
The contrast between the monstrous nature of the crime and the mediocrity of the accused is immediately striking and becomes even more apparent during the thirteen scenes making up this documentary feature, revealing the portrait of a terrifyingly ordinary man.Key words: Adolf Eichmann, Archival footage, Banality of Evil, Bureaucracy, Crimes against humanity jurisdiction, Final Solution, Genocide, Hannah Arendt, Holocaust, Nazism, Obedience
Education Interests: Genocide Studies,German Studies, History, Israeli Studies, International Law, Jewish Studie