"I was right to focus on the perpetrator. Because he's talking from inside the system, Eichmann's testimony is a hundred times more powerful than any survivor's." — Eyal Sivan
In his controversial 1998 film The Specialist, Israeli director Eyal Sivan casts the Holocaust in a new light when he represents it through the eyes of the Nazi perpetrator. Sivan and his scriptwriter, human rights activist Rony Brauman, re-assemble and manipulate footage originally filmed by Leo Hurwitz for Capital Cities Broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann's trial by an Israeli court in Jerusalem in 1961. Sivan recycles the video footage into a 16mm film that critiques, not the heinous nature of Eichmann's crimes, but the system of regulation that constructed and judged him. According to The Specialist, Eichmann's guilt is not on trial; it is a foregone conclusion.
Critics have tended to read The Specialist as a cinematic version of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. But to accept the film as a straightforward translation of the book is to ignore its significant and unique contribution to ongoing debates regarding representations of the Holocaust, since the historical moment of 1998 — with the Israel-Palestine conflict at new levels of violence — is very different from 1961.
As others have noted, The Specialist underlines the trial as a dramatic performance. From its opening moments we are alerted to the fact that we are spectators to a performance of justice, the court as theatrical stage. When Sivan digitally remasters the original images, he distorts the sound, slows down the image, and embellishes the otherwise faint reflections of the audience on the much-discussed glass booth which "caged" Eichmann during the trial. Unlike Arendt's book, The Specialist belongs, for an international audience, within the context of a "post-O.J. Simpson world," casting the historical footage as something akin to Court TV — even as the film remains self-conscious and eschews all pretence to unmediated evidence.
At the centre of Guerin's interpretation lies the intriguing relationship of Eichmann as other to Hausner, and by extension to the Israeli court. On every level of communication Hausner speaks a different language from Eichmann: Hausner speaks in Hebrew, while Eichmann speaks in a bureaucratic German; Eichmann's testimonies are rational and self-assured, while Hausner is often passionate, motivated by frustration, looking for vengeance.
Given this critique of the Israeli court, there is every possibility that The Specialist could strive to absolve Eichmann of his crimes — for nowhere does it represent him as the evil perpetrator. Nevertheless, we never mistake Eichmann for an innocent victim of the accusations in Jerusalem. What is troubling is the film's implicit connection between Eichmann's and Hausner's roles: if Hausner as prosecution represents the Israeli government, and Eichmann represents the system he worked for, then the film nods towards an equation between Nazism and Zionism in its systemic, present-day manifestation. As the credits roll, we are left with a single image of Eichmann in colour, still sitting in the dock — does the ghost of Adolf Eichmann remain in the Zionist consciousness as justification for its continued violence towards, and displacement of, its enemies?
Source : Frances Guerin, University of Kent (Law Text Culture, 10(1)), 01.10.2005