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

Abstract

This article analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt: The Woman Who Saw 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 internalisation and one on externalisation (dialogue). We emphasise von Trotta’s reliance on a negative approach, i.e. the representation of thinking through the absence of any other activity while thinking, capitalising 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 audio-visualises 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 emphasise the importance of a cinema of thinking in our current political environment that seems to be increasingly characterised precisely by the absence of political thinking.