(Extrait d'un essai académique consacré au film Un spécialiste, portrait d'un criminel moderne d'Eyal Sivan et Rony Brauman. Le texte intégral, très dense et abondamment annoté, compte près de 35 pages ; en voici les passages les plus significatifs, centrés sur l'analyse du film.)
The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and Hannah Arendt's report on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, continue to draw legal scrutiny and provoke international political controversy decades after the judgment was pronounced. In the pages of this journal, Shoshana Felman invoked the Dreyfus Affair as a legal and cultural precedent for the epochal Eichmann trial. She argues that the unjust and anti-Semitic prosecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 and Emile Zola's impassioned and now proverbial counter-accusation against Dreyfus's persecutors supply a model for an individual speaking out against a state legal apparatus in the name of a victim of miscarried justice.
While I share Felman's sense of the relevance of the Dreyfus Affair, my analysis of the Eichmann trial leads me to suggest a different relationship between the trial and the Dreyfus Affair than the one Felman proposes. I revisit both the trial and Arendt's critical account of it, taking as my starting point The Specialist, a remarkable 1999 documentary feature on the trial by Eyal Sivan, an Israeli dissident filmmaker, and Rony Brauman, the former head of the Paris-based nongovernmental organization Doctors without Borders.
Sivan and Brauman's French-Israeli-German production, The Specialist, is based on hundreds of hours of documentary footage taken by the American Leo Hurwitz during Eichmann's trial. It edits, shapes, and digitally manipulates this archival film, but does not supplement it with talking heads, photographs, or other material. Its goal is not authenticity, with the suspect overtones of unquestionable authority that claims to authenticity evoke. Rather, the film aims at what the filmmakers call a “desacralized, lay treatment” of the Eichmann case. Seeking to avoid putting themselves on “a pedagogic track,” Sivan and Brauman supply no voice-over commentary that would inform viewers about the events of World War II and the Holocaust.
Several distinctive aspects of The Specialist justify Sivan and Brauman's hopes for its liberating effect on the public perception of the Eichmann case. It shifts the focus of attention away from the victims, where so much Holocaust narrative directs it, to the perpetrator in the dock. Indeed, the trial footage in the film highlights the fact that a trial is a process and a ritual—social, historical, and bureaucratic. We see in the course of the film how law, morality, and force are ambiguously intertwined, even in a case that is often taken as a decisive frame of reference for grounding legal judgments of good and evil.
By foregrounding the legal mise-en-scène of 1961 as an event with an interpretive and political dynamic distinct from, although thickly related to, the events of the Nazi murders, the film makes its most pointed contribution to representing the Holocaust as an occurrence that, like all occurrences, is presentable only in its subsequent stagings. The film is a representation of a representation. Its images of the Israeli courtroom's particular contingencies, as well as its own cinematic contingencies, help a viewer question whether the Holocaust can serve as a last word for instituting and assessing morality and justice.
Using Brechtian effects such as an eerie, quasi-industrial soundtrack, film tinting, and digital manipulations of light, space, and motion, Sivan and Brauman remind viewers that the film, as uncommented as it is, is indeed an artful condensation of a four-month trial. This condensation of over 350 hours of footage does not pose as a transparent abridgment, but is guided by and supports the theses of Arendt's controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
(Référence complète : Benjamin Robinson, “'The Specialist' on the Eichmann Precedent: Morality, Law, and Military Sovereignty,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, n° 1, automne 2003, p. 63–97, The University of Chicago Press.)
Source : Benjamin Robinson — Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, 01.09.2003