I am happy to post this excerpt from an article by OTBKB fave Anne-Katrin Titze about the new movie, Hannah Arendt directed by the great Margarethe von Trotta. The film has a real Brooklyn connection: co-screenwriter Pamela Katz and the star Barbara Sukowa live in Park Slope and Ditmas Park respectively. In the article, Titze quotes Sukowa: “You know, two German women doing this film about Hannah Arendt and this Jewish topic, and the Holocaust, and all. We thought people might say “how dare you?” Luckily then we found a Jew [she looks at screenwriter Katz, to the great amusement of the audience].”
Don’t miss the film, which will be at Film Forum through June 14. Anne-Katrin writes about film for Eye for Film, and also about Prospect Park for various media outlets. In the picture above by Anne-Katrin Titze, Pamela Katz stands next to Janet McTeer who plays Mary McCarthy in the film.
On the evening prior to the exclusive engagement of director Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt at New York’s Film Forum, she, her stars Barbara Sukowa and Janet McTeer and co-screenwriter Pam Katz, along with Jerome Kohn, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at The New School, and adviser on the movie, gathered before an overflowing crowd at New York University’s Deutsches Haus to discuss “the woman behind the film”.
In his introduction, NYU Vice Provost for Arts, Humanities, and Multicultural Affairs Ulrich Baer cited Hannah Arendt: “[she] once said, revolutionaries stay revolutionaries until the day the revolution has happened, then they become conservative the next day. That is not something that could be said about Margarethe von Trotta.”
Von Trotta’s first encounter with Arendt was in Israeli documentary The Specialist, about the Eichmann trial, that impressed her very much. Eichmann In Jerusalem was one of the books she read in preparation for her film Rosenstrasse. As with Rosa Luxemburg, von Trotta said: “I have the feeling they [the subjects] are coming up to me.”
She was hesitant making a film about Arendt after a friend suggested the subject to her. “I said, no, please, go away. It was like Satan, you know, was tempting me and I said no. But when an idea is put in your head, it starts to grow like a flower.”
Barbara Sukowa: ‘Above all, she wanted to start a discussion and a discourse’ Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Her co-screenwriter on Rosenstrasse, Pam Katz was enthusiastic from the start, although von Trotta warned her that Arendt was a thinker, not the most cinematic of professions. “I think my first response to that was,” Katz said “I think I remember that she made a lot of people angry. I think she made a lot of people in my family angry. So there must be something to make a movie about. But I was very naive, you were very correct, and it took us quite a while to figure out how to make this film.”