Hannah Arendt As A Movie
by Dan Lybarger
In her nearly 40-year career, German writer-director Margarethe von Trotta has tackled some challenging subjects. With The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (a 1975 movie she co-directed with her then-husband Volker Schlöndorff, The Tin Drum) and Marianne and Juliane (1981), she examined terrorism decades before other Western filmmakers dealt with it. Her biopic of 12th century German playwright-scientist-musician-theologian-nun Hildegard von Bingen, Vision (2009) wrestled with sexism, religion and simple jealousy, and Rosa Luxemburg (1986) examined the life of the Polish-German revolutionary known as “Bloody Rosa.”
Both of those movies and several others that von Trotta has directed starred Barbara Sukowa, who like von Trotta, acted in movies by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (the director of Lola, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Berlin Alexanderplatz). The two women have teamed up again for “Hannah Arendt,” which examines how the German-born philosopher became reviled for a series of articles she wrote about the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The movie is currently playing at the Film Forum in New York.
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