Vita Activa

Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975, was a prolific and unclassifiable thinker, a political theorist, moral philosopher and polemicist of unmatched range and rigor. At least outside  academic circles, her posthumous fame — or notoriety — rests on “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a piece of extended reportage she wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, and on a single phrase associated with it: the banality of evil.

Those words are evoked so often, and in so many contexts, that their specific and controversial original meaning is easily forgotten. Arendt, attending the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi captured in Argentina by Israeli operatives, was struck by his ordinariness, the bland bureaucratic demeanor seemingly at odds with the enormity of his crimes.

Though later research has suggested that Arendt misjudged Eichmann — who was, for one thing, a much more ardent anti-Semite than he seemed to be, sitting in the dock — the idea that great horror can spring from mundane roots has proved tenacious and perpetually relevant.

“Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt,” a vigorous and thoughtful new documentary by Ada Ushpiz, frames its inquiry into Arendt’s career with her encounter with Eichmann. But its focus is much wider than the still-potent debate over “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which was widely and fiercely attacked for what critics took to be its trivialization of Eichmann’s deeds and its lack of sympathy for his victims. Though both Arendt’s defenders and detractors are heard from, Ms. Ushpiz’s film situates the Eichmann episode within a broad and rich portrait of an intellectual determined to use the tools of rationality to comprehend historical events that seem to defy all reason.

The title insists, as Arendt herself always did, that thinking is a form of action. The “spirit” conjured — through Arendt’s own words, the recollections of students, disciples and friends, and carefully chosen archival images — is one of relentless and passionate mental activity. Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.