The Specialist

The Israeli government determined to preserve a visual record of the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and to film it in its entirety - unlike the Nuremberg Trials, where only chosen moments were filmed. Television was in its infancy, and this was to be the first TV production shot on actual location, the special Eichmann courtroom in Jerusalem. Lacking experienced technicians and facilities, the Israelis turned to ABC-TV, Capital Cities and the American documentary director Leo Hurwitz. With great difficulty, the producers of The Specialist got permission from the Israeli government to gain access to the surviving trial footage, then special pioneering video tapes. The footage provides a special insight into the Nazi death machine that no other war crimes trial had previously attained. The Specialist from Israeli-born, Paris-based Eyal Sivan, is a singularly assured, sure-to-be-controversial documentary that recasts footage of the trial into an hypnotic dance of bureaucratic stubbornness, highlighting the very ordinariness of this eccentric, relentlessly unrepentant monster. Sculpted from 350 surviving hours shot over the course of Eichmann´s trial, this film explores fresh ways of presenting primitively shot material.