It’s troubling when someone whom you regard as a mentor disapproves of something you’ve done, especially if the criticism is harsh, done publicly, and is in parts unfair.
That’s my reaction to “What the Hell Does the Holocaust Have to do With Inverse Condemnation?,” Professor Gideon Kanner’s objections, posted on his own Gideon’s Trumpet blog yesterday, to my review of “Hannah Arendt,” an award-winning movie which we are screening at our upcoming “Let’s Film All The Lawyers” legal film festival at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre (September 14-20, 2013). Along with that film we’ll be showing 12 Angry Men and My Cousin Vinny, and leading post-screening discussions of the movies.
Of course, the short answer to Gideon’s rhetorical question is “absolutely nothing.” A review about a movie that’s decidedly not about inverse condemnation, property law, land use, or eminent domain doesn’t obviously fit in a blog that is focused on those subjects. If you agree, then I plead guilty. But I often post things that aren’t exactly related to the blog’s focus (see here and here for the most recent examples). I do so under the concept of a blog publisher’s “point of privilege” (aka “it’s my blog and I’ll publish what I want”), and in the belief that colleagues who are interested in the areas of law which we find fascinating are also intellectually curious people in general and just might be interested in some of the same things which interest me. Besides, if a reader doesn’t care for a particular post, they can just avoid reading it. And if they really don’t like it, they can protest by not paying their subscription fees for the month. (In case you are wondering whether you somehow missed our invoice in your inbox, you didn’t; I’m being facetious because there is no charge for subscribing to inversecondemnation.com.)
Hannah Arendt is a filmabout a German-Jewish philosopher who, as I wrote:
… introduced the world to theconcept of evil perpetrated by unassuming—even boring—men, bureaucrats of deathwho believed they avoided responsibility for the Holocaust by actively surrenderingtheir consciences to others, or claiming they ‘knew nothing.’ Barbara Sukowawon the Lola, Germany’s version of the Oscar, for her performance as thebrittle, chain-smoking, unrepentant Arendt, covering the Israeli 1961 warcrimes trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker and subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, were controversialat the time, and the film raises many questions, both about the Eichmann trial,and about Arendt herself.
Professor Kanner not only objected to my inclusion of the review on this blog (in addition to the Law In Film site, our film festival’s main page), but questioned why we included a non-legal movie in a law film festival, and in particular objected to my thoughts on the film, deriding me as an “armchair pontificator” on the morality of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Professor Kanner is familiar to anyone who reads this blog. If you consider yourself a student of eminent domain, property, and takings law (as I do), then you must consider him your teacher and sage. Thus, his opinion counts. But in this case, I think his broadsides against my review are not up to his usual quality of commentary. Read my review, then consider whether his reaction fairly evaluates it. I don’t think it does. I won’t go into a point-by-point refutation, but do offer the following thoughts.
Unlike Professor Kanner, I did not get “to see the Holocaust with the original cast.” Thank God for that. But I don’t believe that disqualifies me from reviewing a movie about a real-life person (and apparently a Holocaust survivor herself) who became a controversial figure because of her writings about the Holocaust. I wasn’t on the grassy knoll either, but I really appreciate Oliver Stone’s JFK as a film, even though I understand the movie’s portrayal of the real-life events is a bunch of hooey, and I hardly endorse Stone’s politics. I must admit that before seeing the film, I pretty much had no idea who Hannah Arendt was, other than that she coined the term “banality of evil,” which, agree with her conclusions or not, has become a fixture in the dialogue. This film is as much about the intellectual elite in New York in the early sixties as it is about the trial. The movie poster even features Sukowa profiled against a backdrop of the New York skyline, rather than Jerusalem or Eichmann in a glass box. As a colleague reminded me, you don’t need a movie or a movie review to tell you the perpetrators of the Holocaust were evil men.
Professor Kanner also questioned why we included Hannah Arendt in a festival about legal films, intimating that we were somehow forced to do so:
One more thing. How did that Arendt film make it into the Hawaiian film festival about lawyers? We think we know, and on the basis of what we were told by an insider, it had nothing do with moral fastidiousness or indeed with Eichmann, or for that matter with films about law and lawyers. While we choose to keep his name confidential (but we do have it in writing), here is what he said about the Hawaii lawyers sponsoring the Arendt movie: “The Museum required us to show its for its premiere in Hawaii.” “Required”? Oh yes, where have we heard that one before: I vas only following orders.
That last bit is a somewhat cheap shot, but I appreciate its cheek nonetheless. Count us amused rather than offended. But rather than invoke Godwin’s Law and declare the discussion over, let’s address that issue since it’s no big secret. Before we go further, let me disclose that the Law Film Festival is my pet project, and that I am the “director” of the Festival on our side. Along with my firm colleagues and the good people down at the Doris Duke Theatre who allow us to jointly put on this festival, together we select the programming. We suggest legal films, they suggest films we might not necessarily have heard of (such as Hannah Arendt), and together we agree what gets screened. I suppose the Theatre folks have the ultimate say (it being their property and all, and us believing as we do in property rights), but in the two years we’ve been doing this and learning along the way, they’ve never once required us to include any film in the lineup. Indeed, they’ve been more than deferential to our choices. When they suggested Hannah Arendt, we agreed with its inclusion, not only because it received high accolades from the New York Times (“My only real problem with Hannah Arendt is that it’s not a mini-series.”) and the Los Angeles Times (“Barbara Sukowa is remarkable in the title role in a film built around the philosopher’s charged coverage of Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial for the New Yorker.”), but also because it had not been shown in any Hawaii theatre, and would appeal to those audiences interested in films which raise controversial ideas.
And far from avoiding the reasons why we included the film in our law film lineup as Professor Kanner suggests, that question became a central part of my review since I assumed that potential audience members might ask the same question:
Firstof all, what is Hannah Arendt—which containsfew courtroom scenes (and no lawyer characters), doing in a festival focused onlegal movies? Indeed, the actual footage of the Eichmann trial used in thefilm, while driving the movie’s ideas, is but a sidelight to the story. Ultimately,we settled on including the film because Sukowa’s subtle portrayal of adifficult and somewhat unsympathetic personality made it worthy ofconsideration, and it must have been a challenge to make a movie centered on thoughtsand ideas, not events.
Professor Kanner also trumpets a piece from Commentary magazine by Sol Stern entitled “The Lies of Hannah Arendt,” and if you were to read Gideon’s piece without having read my review first, you might presume I was unaware of this and other criticism of Arendt’s beliefs. Not so. My review highlighted Stern’s commentary:
Second, even a half-century later, Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial continues to be controversial, both for its portrayal of the defendant as well as of the Jewish leaders who Arendt claimed made it easier for the Nazis than they could have. Most recently, for example, Commentary magazine ran a piece titled “The Lies of Hannah Arendt,” arguing the film “distort[s] the historical record and defame[s] many of the thoughtful writers who criticized Arendt—and who were proved right in their critique.” We’ll let you decide whether the film is accurate (or whether a movie has any obligation to be so).
But perhaps it was my review’s near-final paragraph that particularly chapped Gideon’s okole:
But what put us over the top was that Hannah Arendt tied in well with other films about similar cases, Judgment at Nuremberg, most obviously. Eichmann was not tried at Nuremberg because he had already escaped. He was not the subject of “victor’s justice,” or an international tribunal, but was prosecuted in a jurisdiction that did not even exist at the time of his crimes, under the idea that it was a “sacred right” of Israel to try and execute a Nazi for crimes against the Jewish people. As Arendt’s husband proclaims when she tells him she is going to Jerusalem to cover the trial, “you can’t put history on trial,” arguing that the proceeding itself may be “illegal.”
Gideon reserves his harshest excoriation of my review for those thoughts:
While tempted to draw on our WW II experiences and launch into a moral refutation of this whitewash job (that goes something like this: Eichmann wasn’t really all that evil, you see — just a banal bureaucrat), we won’t do that because doing so would only be playing Thomas’ and Ace’s game which we have no intention of doing. However, we would like to see them do their fastidious moralizing, not on the high level of abstraction on which they ponder the soundness of Arendt’s notion of “banality of evil,” but rather on a much lower level of abstraction and tell us instead what they propose to do legally about those who amused themselves during the war by bashing babies’ skulls against a wall, or picking them up with pitchforks and tossing them into a fire (see Jan Gross’ book, “Neighbors”). Anybody got “jurisdiction” over that?
But a close and careful reading of my review reveals that I didn’t endorse the idea that Nuremberg was simply “victor’s justice” or that it was ultra vires, or that Arendt’s theory of motivation was the “correct” one, or that the Eichmann trial was illegitimate. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson has always been a role model of mine, particularly for the part he played in the trials where he temporarily traded in his judicial robes for the Chief Prosecutor’s suit. Rather, these words which my review notes were put in characters’ mouths in Hannah Arendt, and anyone who has seen this film would understand that.
These are the issues the film raises, not those which I endorse.
However, let’s be clear: after publication of his commentary, Gideon graciously also wrote to remind me that despite our intellectual combat, we are friends. His commentary may have smarted, but of our friendship and my enduring regard, there was never any doubt.
Which brings me to my final point in this reponse. Perhaps what understandably fuels Professor Kanner’s commentary is that my review did not proclaim that Hannah Arendt’s ideas were grossly wrong, and that Hannah Arendt is a piece of dreck and thus does not deserve a spot, much less one of the featured spots, in our law film festival. That by not choosing sides I have chosen sides. But, unlike Professor Kanner, I did not feel qualified to comment on the real Hannah Arendt, and whether she deserves our approbation or our scorn. But I do know that the film got me to thinking more about this dark stain in history, and because of that, it deserved its place in our festival.
Or just maybe it’s the fact that the title to my review asserted that Hannah Arendt is a “Great Legal Movie.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t — on both counts.
I invite you to see it, and to decide for yourself.
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Showtimes (I will be introducing the film and leading the post-screening discussion):
Saturday Sep 14 01:00 PM
Saturday Sep 14 Opening Night Reception: 6-7:30PM. Enjoy food and wine for purchase, and mingle with sharp legal minds before screening at 7:30pm. $15, $12 museum members
Tuesday Sep 17 07:30 PM
Friday Sep 20 07:30 PM
Purchase tickets for all shows here.