Visualising political thinking on the screen: a dialogue between von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt and its protagonist

Abstract

This article analyzes Margarethe von Trotta's film Hannah Arendt: The Woman WhoSaw Banality in Evil through its protagonist's own writings on visual culture, visibility and invisibility in the context of political thinking. We start by clarifying Arendt's understanding of political theory as an activity aiming to provoke thinking. We then discuss systematically the visual language of the film and offer a typology of its representations of political thinking, subdivided into a part on internationalization and one on externalization (dialogue). We emphasize von Trotta's reliance on a negative approach, i.e. the representation of thinking through the absence of any other activity while thinking, capitalizing on the power of the invisible. However, the film and its director do not entirely succeed in engaging viewers politically. This is so because, first, the film's lack of conceptual innovation renders difficult the emergence of subject positions on the part of viewers other than consumers of established opinion. Secondly, the film insufficiently to audio-visualizes the external-communicative dimension of Arendt's political thinking: a dialogue in which viewers can participate and in the course of which what seemed to be established through political thinking gets deconstructed and subsequently re-ordered. Finally, we emphasize the importance of a cinema of thinking in our current political environment that seems to be increasingly characterized precisely by the absence of political thinking.