When Adolph Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel in 1961, the event was broadcast live under the direction of documentarian Leo Hurwitz. That footage, over 500 hours of it, has been locked away in the decades since. Eyal Sivan, inspired by Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, received permission to dig through the footage for a concentrated portrait of the trial and the man.

The balding, middle-aged Eichmann looks as scary as an accountant as he snaps to attention for every question, answering with a "Yawohl" before reading from records or repeating his mantra: "I had to obey... I was a soldier." Painting himself as nothing but a bureaucrat with a ruthless efficiency ("I does not mean Eichmann," he claims, trying to distance himself from the odious orders he signed), the only emotion he exhibits is a terrifying pride in his meticulous service: "I was never reprimanded," he offers by way of explanation. Though Sivan compiled this film from documentary recordings, he finds some haunting images: the reflection of newel footage on the glass cage that protects Eichmann as he blankly watches the record of atrocities, the concentration camp tattoo on the arm that reaches into frame to play evidence from a tape recorder, the bland, emotionless face of Eichmann that dominates the film. Far from an "objective" record of the event, The Specialist indeed captures the "banality of evil" in Eichmann, and that's genuinely frightening. (Sean Axmaker)

"It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never radical, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrowand lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ’thought-defying,’asI said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. Only the Good has depth and can be radical." (Hannah Arendt, Encounter, Jan. 1964, vol. xxii, No. 1, p. 56.)
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=18645999013447

"But in The Specialist , Sivan and Brauman make no pretense of objectivity. They are sophisticated people; as a filmmaker, Sivan has been concerned with the politics of memory and with the Israelis' attempts to write the Palestinians out of history, while Brauman, as a past chair of Médecins Sans Frontières, knows something about the relationship between relief efforts and the news media. The two filmmakers seem to have noticed the irony inherent in the "complete record" of the Eichmann trial, which is not complete at all but rather the semi-rotted remains of whatever Leo Hurwitz selected from whatever could be seen from four distinct viewpoints. It might have been possible to conceal how these materials, with their blind spots and damage, fall short of the implied goal, which is omniscience. Instead, Sivan and Brauman have chosen this very inadequacy as their theme." Final Cut on Final Solution? by Stuart Klawans
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000508/klawans

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