Customer Reviews

The Specialist - Portrait of a Modern Criminal

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Don't get me wrong: this is an outstanding film, both technically (the recovery and restoration of the original raw videotaped footage, from 1961 (!), was painstaking and the results are superb) and artistically (especially in its use of Altman-esque overlapping voices and vaguely unsettling instrumental score). I highly recommend it to any student of modern history, WWII, and/or the Holocaust in particular. The filmmakers did a wonderful job of fleshing out (literally & figuratively) Hannah Arendt's central thesis (see Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem"), namely that the Nazis' mechanized, bureaucratic approach to genocide gave birth to a new type of evil in the world. This "banal" fiend, personified by Eichmann, does not do evil in furtherance of personal motives or hatreds, but rather as an abstracted "cog" in a larger machine (not of his own design or making) that has the effect of diffusing responsibility (and, along with it, guilt, remorse, or any moral understanding/feeling for his actions). This type of desk-job-murderer supposedly thinks only of his narrow tasks, which must be fulfilled in the name of duty/honor and careerist aspirations. And, so, according to Arendt, it was absurb for the Israeli prosecutors to make out Eichmann as this monster who was among those most responsibile for perpetrating the Holocaust. As I said, the filmmakers do an excellent job illustrating this thesis.

It isn't the film I have a quarrel with, but Arendt. She -- and by extension the filmmakers -- buy into Eichmann's defense (even if not to the point of absolving him of criminal responsibility), which was carefully honed during 15 years of hiding as a fugitive from the Allies' war crimes indictment. Eichmann has, by the time of his capture by Israeli intelligence agents, refined his script beyond that of the Nuremberg defendants ("I was only following orders"), to include the "cog in the machine" theme: "I only organized the transports; I did not do the killing upon arrival of the transports at the camps!" Of course, Eichmann downplays several salient facts, namely that he knew all along what the fate of his "cargo" would be, and that he never expressed publicly or privately any misgivings with the Nazis' extermination plans (of which he was a vital element). Indeed, the testimony of his closest associates conclusively establishes that Eichmann was, contrary to Arendt's thesis, a willing and entusiastic participant in the genocide -- among other details, there is his boast near the end of the war that he did not fear capture by the Allies, but would instead "jump happily into [his] grave, with the knowledge that [he] was responsible for exterminating 5 million jews!" Doesn't sound so banal & detached to me.

In the end, it doesn't much matter how you view Arendt's thesis -- either Eichmann is a chillingly amoral man who willingly played a major role in facilitating the Holocaust, or he is an inconceivably evil monster who happily did his most to bring about the extermination of European Jewry -- and then crafted a defense (possibly as a self-defense to allow him to live with the knowledge of his crimes) good enough to fool one of the 20th century's most brilliant philosophers. Either way, this film is an invaluable window into a thoroughly terrible -- though hauntingly "normal"-appearing -- individual.

The Specialist is a new film created entirely of footage of the trial of Eichmann, from the early 1960s.

This is a powerful holocaust document.

The viewer is invited to observe an impassive, confused, perplexed, and frustrated man. The defendant is questioned over and over "did you feel what you were doing was wrong?" He intones repeatedly that he was "a specialist," an expert in relocation and evacuation, who was consulted because of his expertise in the field. He said that he routed the trains. He said he was not responsible for the concentration camps or the fate of Jews.

Watching testimony in this film can be difficult. Men tell of losing their entire families. A man stands before the court and enumerates the ages of his siblings and parents when they were living during World War II. The man is asked how many of his family members survived the war. He responds that he was the only one.

Footage was taken from all parts of a very long trial, and spliced together artfully to give the viewer a picture of the Eichmann trial. One reasonable interpretation is that the trial was basically a show-- all parties present had decided that Eichmann was guilty and he would hang. Eichmann himself cuts a memorable figure: an unassuming, bespectacled man in a suit, quietly sorting through documents and rising again and again to speak, asserting that he was not responsible for the "unfortunate" events in the concentration camps, that he was only "a specialist."

My only qualm with the videotape is this: the film is black and white. Some dialogue is in English, and French. Most of the dialogue is in Hebrew and German. The white subtitles on the background were very difficult to read. Yellow subtitles would be preferable in future editions.

The Specialist is a useful and powerful Holocaust and World War II documentary.

ken32

Adolf Eichmann is frightening to behold in this fascinating documentary, both because of his tidy, mild-mannered appearance (think a mid-career insurance salesman) and seemingly unshakeable confidence that he committed no crime and merely fulfilled his duty as a soldier. Given the mad trial rantings of other war criminals, Eichmann's imperturbable performance is a perfect illustration of Hannah Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil." See "The Specialist" for a reminder of how barbarity can be experienced at the wrong end of a rubber stamp.

Wow, i just picked up this movie on impulse, and ho-lee moly. After reading Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil", i thought i was ready to watch Eichmann go, but [wow]. Eichmann sits impassive while he rattles off atrocities that he allowed to happen, and is thoroughly confused by the fact that he is being tried at all. Eichmann's inability to see his own wrongs is the most heartbreaking and frustrating about the picture. heartily recommended for anyone with any morbid interest in the Holocaust and Eichmann.

I have just bought and seen this film on DVD. The subtitles are excellent in English. There was no problem reading them whatsoever. The audio was very clear and the black and white picture was sharp. Given the complaints about the subtitles noted by other reviewers, maybe they were cleaned up for the DVD. The subtitles in English on the DVD are crystal clear.

The DVD shows how an almost mediocre-looking man, looking very much like an accountant or life insurance salesman, could calmly and in a routine fashion, go about the business of sending millions of innocent people to their deaths. Eichmann portrayed himself as simply a bureaucratic cog in the machinery of genocide. He was, of course, under the Gestapo chief, Muller, and the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, the one responsible for the "final solution."

I give this item four stars only because I was ultimately depressed watching it but I could not leave it either. I would like it to be in color of course but it was black and white, also more digressions on the attandees like the judges, the state attorney, the witnesses etc would be better, but then it would be a series of DVDs. This documentary is more than what it seems. Eichman is an SS, he has carried that hat with the scull insignia on it for years, even when he was gassing the women and the children, at a breakout of the conscious all he could say was murmuring to himself "Oh Jesus, forgive us for what we do...", and he went on gassing the people. In the court you could not even hear this from this guy, he never showed a sign of repentance, even once, a sign of understanding the pain of the victims, even once, he did not even pretend. To him, what he was doing was a business, and all in all, he was good in the business, so what was there to have the trial? Israelis tried to take a word of, a single sign of regret, even one of the judges spoke to him in German, with a good German that is, but he did not grant his simple sign at all.
But there is more than that in this documentary. You will find out about the work of Judenrat in Nederlands, and Merkez in Hungary. You will see the comprador leadership of some members of the Hungarian Rabbinate at the time, yet there was no regret of handing in 300,000 Jews to the Nazi`s, a point often underestimeted or not talked about at all. May be people do not want to remember such pain any more.
There is more than Eichman in Eichman trial. So, this is a DvD worth seing, but get ready to be depressed for a while anyway.

Adolf Eichmann is frequently referred to as the architect of the Holocaust, and rightly so. He was the individual tasked with organizing the mass deportation of Jews to the ghettos and eventually the concentration and extermination camps in parts of Europe. He performed his job with such zeal and ruthless determination resulting in the large numbers of human casualties during the Holocaust. It's amazing to watch this individual during his trial as there's a sharp contrast between his demeanor and those of other Nazi criminals who had been put on trial earlier during the Nuremberg trials. Many of those criminals were prone to outbursts and rantings, defending their actions as part of their job. Well, Eichmann certainly considered his given task of dispatching innocents to their deaths as part of his job (and he did it with the utmost zeal!), but what is interesting is his calm and composed, matter-of-fact manner.

In describing the trial and Eichmann himself, Hannah Arendt (a notable political theorist and also Jewish) used the term "the banality of evil". In the context of Eichmann, Arendt's views illustrated the contrast between the crime (mobilizing the mass murder of millions) and the seemingly ordinary appearance of the man accused of this crime, who was seemingly just doing his job without reflecting upon his actions and the resulting catastrophic consequences. I don't subscribe to this thesis - based on the testimonies of some high-ranking Nazis and his closest associates, Eichmann was a cold, efficient, and zealous participant who orchestrated the Holocaust. Is this reflective of banality? I think not. The production however is invaluable for providing insights into this seemingly ordinary-looking man whose benign appearance masks his crimes, i.e. facilitating the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

The Specialist takes archived footage of the Eichmann trial and rearranges and morphs it to a candid look into the mind of an efficient bureaucrat. This man was considered by all as a specialist in his field. His field was the transporting of human beings to death camps. What kind of man could do such a ghastly thing?

This film shows a man no better than a beast in the jungle. Eichmann epitomizes the moral and spiritual devolution of German leadership in that era. Where he and his colleagues created a clockwork of death, and they took pride in it's efficiency.

This film is not lighthearted. Just with archived videotape footage, the director created a horrifying document of the loss of God in a culture.

The music score created for this document is incredibly chilling. It depicts the sinister mind of the accused. Never before has a solitary pluck on a violin string sounded more horrifying.

Leave it to the French conscious to reveal to us history that most people ignore today, or pretend that never happened. This film is a little known masterpiece in factual cinema.

The other reviews might be right about one thing. This is out of the ordinary.

That is possibly the only thing positive I have to say about it. It failed to capture me as a spectator. The "arty" music cuts were misplaced, ill-coordinated and disrupted the dialogue. The dialogue might have been interesting, but looses points on the bad sound quality on portions of it. I don't blame the director for it, but he really should reconsider his ideas on editing. The frequent and sudden cuts disrupts any form of timeline, adding confusion to whatever this documentary has in mind to convey.

In fact, it was hard to find out what this trial was all about if you didn't know who Eichmann was and what he did.
No, I didn't get the point of this, nor am I afraid to be so unpolitically correct as to say so. It did not make me any more enlightened of Eichmann or holocaust watching this. In short: this is an unecessary waste of time and money. I recommend reading Hannah Arendt instead.