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

2016

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, c…