The Specialist

1999
7.3| 2h8m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 31 March 1999 Released
Producted By: Lotus-Film
Country: Israel
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://en.lotus-film.at/films/a-specialist
Info

Composed exclusively of the footage recorded by Leo Hurwitz during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, A Specialist is a courtroom drama painting the portait of a zealous bureaucrat who has immense respect for the Law and hierarchy, a police official responsible for the elimination of several million people, a modern criminal.

Genre

Documentary

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Director

Eyal Sivan

Production Companies

Lotus-Film

The Specialist Videos and Images
  • Top Credited Cast
  • |
  • Crew
Adolf Eichmann as Himself

The Specialist Audience Reviews

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
Paula Blair This documentary is supposed to be fake to express the falseness of Eichmann's trial - it was a 'show trial' to hold Nazi war criminals to account. He was kidnapped and taken to Israel - thought to be home for all Jews and put on trial there even though his crimes were against humanity and committed all over Europe.Although the outcome of his execution was irrefutably right, the process of getting to it was not.If you are interested in this you should read a book by Hannah Arendt called 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' to find out more.Always keep an open mind - sometimes lies need to be told to get to the truth.
rsht61 As a rebuttal to the old claims reposted last year by Topher-26, I would like to state that Eyal Sivan's claims that any of my claims about his forgeries are lies are themselves untrue. A reasonable reader will see how childishly irrelevant most of his reactions have been, but what even a reasonable reader will not see without being thus informed is that the six paragraphs containing his defence to my claims contain at least 14 factually untrue statements (which could easily have been checked by Haaretz reporter Goel Pinto before publication - but were not). These statements were brought up again by Sivan's defenders during the latest scandal he caused in the first half of 2007 and I rebutted them in detail in a number of frameworks, all easily found on the internet by anyone sufficiently hi-tech to have mastered use of a search engine. "The Specialist" is fiction, not documentary; his other statements render his claim not to have intended deception risible; he has been very untruthful about the technical work he claimed to have done - and not done - on the film, and this includes plagiarism; and he has slandered the institution that actually carried out the preservation of the tapes, for which he has falsely been claiming credit for the last decade or so. In the publicity for lectures I delivered on this subject this past January in Vienna and Beersheva (the Vienna lecture is available - in English - in Prof. Frank Stern's anthology "Filmische Gedaechtnisse," published by Mandelbaum Verlag) I described "The Specialist" and the publicity surrounding it as arguably the most comprehensive and meticulously planned deception in the history of the moving image. I stand by that description and consider it lamentable that most viewers continue to fall obliviously into the trap laid by Eyal Sivan's gross distortion of history in complete ignorance of the facts.R.S.H. Tryster (former Director, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive), Berlin
t02446 The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive claims that large parts of this documentary about the Eichmann trial are a forgery. You can read an article about it here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/533873.htmlHillel Tryster, director of the Jewish Film Archive, spent hundreds of hours comparing this documentary to the original trial tapes.(quoting from the Haaretz article) Tryster determines: "While I watched and made comparisons, it gradually became clear that the film 'The Specialist' was almost entirely a perverse fraud, ranging from radical editing to artificial dialogs that never took place." Tryster notes scenes where answers and reactions are grafted to questions which they did not follow, and even sounds such as canned laughter are added at points to change the implied mood in the courtroom.
GMeleJr EIN SPEZIALIST, a montage of original footage from the 1961 Jerusalem trials of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, is a horrifying film. That a man who is seemingly so normal could have been the "specialist", who organized one of modern history's greatest crimes is so disturbing that it leaves one thinking what, if anything, really separates us humans from animals.