The Beauty and the Beast

Overview

The Beauty and the Beast was filmed inside the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Milan. The museum is empty, except for a little girl who, with an old satchel on her back, walks through it, crossing the gazes of taxidermied animals inside the display cases. The girl’s innocence contrasts with the text she reads—almost as if voicing her thoughts—while the camera follows her from behind. What we hear is an altered excerpt from The Banality of Evil by German philosopher Hannah Arendt. As she reads, the child seems to pose profound questions to the viewer about life, death, and human violence. The name of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official prosecuted in the historic Jerusalem trial for crimes against humanity, has been removed from the text so that the girl never says his name—instead referring to him only as He or It. This decision stems from the desire not to focus on a single historical episode, but to address the concept of the banality of evil in a broader, universal sense.

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