The controversy over whether director Eyal Sivan should be publicly funded prompts me to write the following lines. Some of Sivan's supporters have dredged up his defence to my claims about his work on "The Specialist," which were widely reported in early 2005. Sivan falsely labeled some of my claims lies and I wish the record set straight. Contrary to Sivan's heavy insinuations that I am not to be trusted because I am a slave to Zionist ideology, I neither live in Israel nor am I either affiliated formally, or by sympathy, with any part of the Israeli political spectrum.
Sivan has falsely claimed not to have supported boycott calls against Israel. He has endorsed a call to boycott all Israeli art and cultural institutions and events until Israel completes a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and dismantles all West Bank settlements.
"The Specialist" is widely regarded as a documentary about the Eichmann trial. Is it? No, it is a work of fiction, for the simple reason that it depicts events that never took place. How has Sivan achieved this, if all his source material is authentic? By the simple expedient of replacing every shot that doesn't match what he wants to show with one that does conform, regardless of original context. Eichmann is divested of all traits that are not bureaucratic, while Prosecutor Gideon Hausner is villified. At no point in "The Specialist" is it safe to assume that any two shots originally belonged together.
Sivan commits forgery, as when he removes witness Pinchas Freudiger's description of a jack-booted, uniformed, armed and bellowing Eichmann with "reassuring," which originally referred to a meeting without Eichmann. He also fabricates, as when he shows a witness reacting with silence to a question about his lack of resistance he was never asked — the witness who was asked the question provided an immediate and satisfactory answer, while the witness who was shown was silent because he was recovering from the emotional strain of recounting how he came across his sister's body in a pile of corpses at Treblinka.
Everyone seems to have believed Sivan's claims that the Spielberg Archive neglected the originals, letting them rot in a toilet for over 33 years. Everyone who believes those claims is ignorant of the truth. The originals from which Sivan worked are of excellent quality, often indistinguishable from what appears in his film, and the picture is frequently brighter than what Sivan gives his audience. Eyal Sivan first saw the tapes when he visited the Archive for his film on Yeshayahu Leibowitz; I showed him the tapes, both copies and originals, and concealed nothing about their history.
In the book they published to go with the film, Sivan and Brauman claim that Yad Vashem was built on the ruins of the Arab village Summeil, destroyed in 1948. I asked Hebrew University Geography Prof. Ruth Kark about this claim and her reply was "nonsense." Sivan has repeated it elsewhere and it is still on his website.
Everything written above is documented and can be proven. It will easily be seen that nowhere in the film "The Specialist," nor in anything he has said about the film, has Eyal Sivan acquitted himself either honestly or honorably. Sivan should not be judged for his politics, but for his actions. Eyal Sivan has "freedom of speech," but freedom of speech does not mean that those who know the record of this man are obliged to encourage his employment in the fields of media or education.
Source : R.S.H. (Hilel) Tryster, 18.05.2007