Reviews
Un spécialiste, portrait d'un criminel moderne (1999)
R.S.H. Tryster's response to Eyal Sivan's lie accusations
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