Special Screening

In 1961 Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem for Nazi war crimes. Leo Hurwitz recorded the trial on 350 hours of film. Israeli film-maker Eyal Sivan's documentary Un spécialiste consists exclusively of this footage.

Out of this material, he crystallises the portrait of the defendant who was responsible for the deportation of Jews to the death camps between 1941 and 1945. Eichmann confesses to this and elaborates on his conflict between conscience and duty. But he insists that he always did his job well and saw himself as "an instrument of superior powers". He argues that if he hadn't followed orders, someone else would have.

The specialist for the "Jewish issue" (50 years old at the time of the trial), Eichmann sits in a glass box in the court amid piles of documents. Even when faced with the death penalty, he remains the man who considered the Nazi mass extermination a matter of bureaucratic precision. Eichmann embodies for Sivan the banality of evil.