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The Dialogue Between Cinema and Philosophy: Hannah Arendt by Margarethe Von Trotta



Author(s)

Alessio Tommasoli

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.04.008

Università Europea di Roma, Rome, Italy

Hannah Arendt, the new film by the German director Margarethe Von Trotta, does not seem just like another trying to represent philosophy through the classic cinematic storytelling. It builds instead a perfect dialogue between these two practices that never encroach each other: There is not any doctrine that prevents cinema’s freedom to create images and any philosophy claim that forces cinema to find in images an alternative way of expression. Von Trotta leaves any biopic form and stages a harmonic building where cinema fulfills philosophy and philosophy fulfills cinema. In this way she gets an outright practical exhibition of a theory, the “banality of evil”. We want to comprehend the reasons of this perfect building analyzing this film, its characters with their acts, all the images, their montage, and editing, everything that supports the Arendt’s philosophical notion. We work on the film with the philosophical categories created by Gilles Deleuze to study the history of cinema in two essays, Image-mouvement and Image-time. In this way we can unfold how Margarethe Von Trotta represents a theory through images, without any word as intermediary.

Hannah Arendt, philosophy, Margarethe Von Trotta, Gilles Deleuze, film aesthethics, cinema