“Hannah Arendt” is a remarkable film that manages to combine gripping drama with intellectual exploration. I worried that – like the writings of the German-Jewish philosopher at the heart of this biographical film – I would find it hard-going and dense, but in fact director Margarethe von Trotta has produced one of the most engaging films I’ve seen in yonks.
A professor who was a top student of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) goes to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. The five articles she produces – later collected in a book – raise hell among Jewish intellectuals, who are horrified both by her concept of “the banality of evil,” and by the role she suggests was held by the European Jewish leadership during the Holocaust.
At the heart of the film is Arendt’s loving relationship with her husband and with her best friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (played by Janet McTeer). Flashbacks to her time as Heidegger’s protégé are revealing, and set the pattern for an adulthood in which so many folks around Arendt seem to lust for her. The way in which her colleagues turn on her after the publication of the New Yorker pieces seems grounded not only in their post-war trauma as Jews, but also in the emotional frustration that she does not reciprocate their passion.
Arendt is repeatedly criticized for being too intellectual and insufficiently emotional. It is the usual dismissal of women philosophers turned inside out and upside down (“too emotional,” “on the rag”), less than a decade before the feminist movement would explode.
The film is beautifully constructed, relentlessly engaging, and damned smart. The period of 1960-64, with smoking in the classrooms and women starting to break into academia, is honestly conveyed. If you want a grown-up film with superb acting (Barbara Sukowa played Rosa Luxemburg in an earlier von Trotta movie) that makes you glad you can think, don’t miss “Hannah Arendt.”
Ever since it was nominated for an academy award in the documentary category this past year, I have wanted to see “How To Survive a Plague,” David France’s fierce film about the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power ) and its sub- group TAG (Treatment Action Group). The film traces the history of the people who came together in March 1987 in fury and fear to face the inaction of the government, the sluggishness of the pharmaceutical companies, and the bureaucracy of the FDA, in the face of the AIDs pandemic.
People affected by HIV and AIDs were forced, because of institutional apathy or worse, to take the medical science into their own hands. Many of them privileged, educated white men used to being in control, they had a confidence which, when combined with their desperation over the rolling cloud of death, led to an exciting militant and effective activist group.
We get to know them through amazing archival film – this was a heavily documented movement – and watch as some of the bravest fighters slowly lose their lives to the virus. We watch as they adopt radical processes to use in making decisions and developing their strategy – many of them derived from the women’s movement. They change the course of history. They inject patients into every aspect of diagnosis, treatment, and research, and finally – far, far too late for so many heroes – they are reborn due to combination therapies that swiftly reduce their viral load.
Beating back death has been the focus of their lives for so long that actually living is a challenge for which they are completely unprepared. It takes years for some to digest the necessity to find meaning in survival, and to deal with the unspeakable grief of moving on without their friends and lovers, for whom the new treatment came too late.
“How To Survive a Plague” manages to be both deeply moving and factually informative, as it educates viewers about the development of scientific knowledge from the earliest days of the epidemic. Silence=Death, they said, and raised a noise. Their outrageous guerilla theater, fearless confrontations with politicians at the highest levels, die-ins, mass civil disobedience, devoted solidarity, and ultimately their frustrations and organizational splits combine to make a universally admired film about a historic refusal to lay down at the feet of death. Don’t miss this film.
It’s been a stressful day. But this was one blow I could have done without.
I’m on my way to teach back-to-back senior fitness classes in Roxbury when I remember that I forgot to take ibuprofen for the pain that doesn’t seem to go away – although it was supposed to go away a week ago – from that toe procedure. So I stop in Walgreens for pills and notice the sign on the door: Today: 15% discount on all purchases for seniors.
I buy the pills and some oversized Band-Aids that I’m wrapping around the toe, and as the young woman is ringing them up, I say, “I’m a senior.”
She looks bewildered at my interruption and says, “Well, duh, obviously, ma’am.”
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