Zeitgeist Films

Barbara Sukowa in “Hannah Arendt,” a film that follows the German-American philosophy professor as she covered Adolph Eichmann’s war-crimes trial in Jerusalem.

Fifty years ago, a small book called “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” by a New School philosophy professor named Hannah Arendt set off a storm like few books before or since. Among Upper West Side intellectuals it sparked, as the critic Irving Howe put it, “a civil war,” siring vicious debates and souring lifelong friendships. It also sold more than 100,000 copies and reshaped the way people have thought about the Holocaust, genocide and the puzzle of evil ever since.

“The Controversy” — as people simply called the growing dispute — is largely forgotten now, and the intense rancor it inspired might seem improbable. But a new movie about the episode, “Hannah Arendt,” which opens Wednesday at Film Forum, revives the debates and the era.

Its director, Margarethe von Trotta, a veteran of the New German Cinema, was skeptical when a friend suggested she make this film 10 years ago. “My first reaction was, how can I make a film about a philosopher, someone who sits and thinks?” she recalled in a phone interview from her home in Paris.

She and her American screenwriter, Pamela Katz, wrote a treatment that covered Arendt’s whole life, but it was too long and diffuse. They decided to focus instead on the Eichmann affair. “It’s better for filmmakers to have a confrontation, not just abstraction,” Ms. von Trotta said.

In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann — the last surviving Nazi higher-up, who had fled to Argentina at the end of the war — was kidnapped by Mossad agents, flown to Jerusalem and tried for crimes against humanity.

Arendt, a Jewish-German refugee and author of a celebrated tome, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. (Her book originally ran as a five-part article.)

She made two particularly provocative points. The first was that Eichmann, a senior SS officer, was not the malicious organizer of the Nazi death camps, as Israeli prosecutors charged, but rather a mediocre bureaucrat, “a leaf in the whirlwind of time,” as Arendt put it; “not a monster” but “a clown.” Hence the enduring phrase from her book’s subtitle: “the banality of evil.”

Arendt’s second point was that the “Jewish Councils” in Germany and Poland were complicit in the mass murder of their own people. They helped the Nazis round up the victims, confiscate their property and send them off on trains to their doom. Without these Jewish leaders, Arendt wrote, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six million people.” She added, “To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders” was “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of this whole dark story.”

For these ideas, Arendt was pilloried as a self-hating Jew. The Anti-Defamation League sent out letters urging rabbis to denounce her on the High Holy Days. Jewish organizations paid researchers to peruse her book for errors. Some of her closest friends didn’t speak to her for years, if ever again.

At the time, Israel was just 15 years old: tiny, weak and impoverished. The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had ballyhooed the Eichmann trial — one of the first global media events — to build support for his fledgling state and to educate people about the Holocaust. In America, Jewish professionals, especially in academia, were just coming into their own, as blacklists and quotas withered away. And here was the great scholar Hannah Arendt downplaying their great catch and airing their dirty laundry.

Some of the attacks on Arendt — that she sympathized with Eichmann or demonized the Jewish victims more than their Nazi killers — were over the top. But some of Arendt’s views were over the top as well, not least her portrait of Eichmann. Her “banality of evil” thesis rests on the premise that Eichmann committed his deeds with no awareness of their evil, not even with virulent anti-Semitism. In fact, though, much evidence — some of it known at the time, some unearthed since — indicates that Eichmann very much knew what he was doing.

In 1957 in Argentina, a former SS officer named Willem Sassen interviewed Eichmann at length. The tapes, which were rediscovered only a few years ago, reveal Eichmann boasting that he had helped draft the letter ordering the Final Solution and that several times, he refused requests from fellow officers to free a favored Jew.

“I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire,” he says. “I was not just a recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist.”

Vanessa Gavalya

George Strait explores dark shades on the album “Love Is Everything.”

When Romanthony died earlier this month, word of the news took almost two weeks to reach the dance music community that he’d been so vital to. But that wasn’t a surprise for this house music producer and singer, who’d move in and out of reclusive periods, preferring to work in relative anonymity, even as his records spoke loudly. An influential figure but by no means a prolific one, Romanthony (born Anthony Moore) sang with a combination of ecstasy and restraint, and his catalog of material from the mid and late 1990s (often on his own imprint Black Male Records) remains vibrant. “Let Me Show You Love,” “Hold On,” “The Wanderer”: these are foundational soulful house records, nourishing and also raw at the seams. (Recently, the label Glasgow Underground has been undertaking a remix campaign of some of Romanthony’s older material.)

His highest-profile work was on the 2001 Daft Punk album “Discovery” (Virgin), writing lyrics and contributing vocals to “Too Long” and “One More Time,” one of modern dance music’s most important and euphoric songs. But if anything, that spotlight sent him back into the shadows. For most of the 2000s he was quiet, and only lately did he pop back up, collaborating with Kevin McKay, Kraak & Smaak and others, and working on songs with Boys Noize and MikeQ at the time of his death.

George Strait

LOVE IS EVERYTHING

George Strait is a stoic, not much for sentiment, so there’s almost no way to prepare for the dark clouds hovering over the best parts of “Love Is Everything” (MCA Nashville), his latest studio album. Mr. Strait’s prolific career is drawing down — he’s released almost an album a year since 1981, and he’s on the verge of his last tour — and he’s finally letting the sunsets get to him.

A true country moderate, Mr. Strait has never given George Jones a run for his money like he does on “Blue Melodies,” where he sings with a pulpy richness he hasn’t touched in decades. The only song solely written by Mr. Strait here, “I Just Can’t Go On Dying Like This,” is a paragon of dignified regret, practically slumping over with hurt. Musically, this album is fuller-bodied than much of his recent work, which has often been listless and by rote, the work of a man churning out the songs he knows will keep the ship afloat. But from “I Believe,” which appears to be inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, to the album closer, “When the Credits Roll,” about taking stock of one’s life, Mr. Strait’s blood is pumping more intensely than usual. From a man who’s as close to clockwork as it gets, it represents the unmistakable realization that time is indeed slipping away.

Colin Stetson

NEW HISTORY WARFARE VOL. 3:

TO SEE MORE LIGHT

“New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light” (Constellation) is Colin Stetson’s mesmerizing new album. It’s difficult-sounding — the product of Mr. Stetson’s circular breathing techniques and his gift for multiphonics — but in fact it is not so difficult, this album. Mr. Stetson, who plays alto, tenor and bass saxophones, recorded these songs live, in single takes, and emerged with songs that are elegantly composed and violently textured. He’s a marvel, and produces sounds that are deeply anxious yet also exultant, sometimes like viciously seesawing heavy metal (“Brute”) or aching whales (“High Above a Grey Green Sea”) or an industrial dirge (the never-dull 15-minute “To See More Light”).

Mr. Stetson has also lately been playing with Bon Iver, and Justin Vernon, that group’s primary engine, is featured on four songs here. Legibility has been a hallmark of Mr. Vernon’s recent side projects — the unashamed blues boogie of the Shouting Matches, or his coming gig producing the Blind Boys of Alabama. But on “Brute,” he howls and churns, practically veering into grindcore territory. Mr. Stetson has unleashed him, too.

N.O.R.E.

STUDENT OF THE GAME

The long tail of the Queens rapper N.O.R.E.’s career has been far longer than anyone could have anticipated. He survived the incarceration of his former partner in Capone-N-Noreaga; an unexpected pop hit, “Superthug”; a misfire reggaetón phase — and more. That he would manage to pull off a minor hit, “Tadow,” as catchy as anything from his prime years is a shock. That it’s not the only bright spot on his new album, “Student of the Game” (Entertainment One), is a relief and thrill.

N.O.R.E. isn’t as manic a barker as he once was, but his voice still has a winningly mealy texture, even on songs like the contemplative title track and “What I Had to Do.” It’s put to better use, though, on tracks that deliver mid-’90s New York classicism like “Camouflage Unicorns” and “Built Pyramids.” N.O.R.E. has never been a superstar, but he’s widely loved, enough to secure guest appearances from the likes of Lil Wayne, Scarface and Raekwon, and on “The Problem (LAWWWDDD),” to collaborate with Pharrell, who as part of the Neptunes produced N.O.R.E.’s biggest hits, “Superthug” and “Nothin’.” There’s also a hilarious skit with enthused testimony from Scott Disick, the nattily attired squire of Kourtney Kardashian, even funnier because the credits misspell his name.

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929 A Natalia Goncharova costume from “Sadko,” in this show at the National Gallery of Art.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

A poster with a Cocteau drawing of Nijinsky, for the company’s 1913 season.

To visit the big Diaghilev show at the National Gallery of Art here is to feel all this anew. It’s well known that Serge Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario, brought together some of the greatest artists of the early 20th century to modernize and revolutionize theater and dance with his Ballets Russes. This exhibition, subtitled “When Art Danced With Music,” shows how he not only caught the waves of history but also kept causing new ones: in the visual arts, in music and in choreography, he was a vital agent in commissioning successive stages of modernism and in redefining classicism. Audiences went to the Ballets Russes to discover novelty, sensation, shock, the changing world of 1909-29.

One example: a costume in the first room could easily pass for 1960s psychedelic multicolor pajamas. Actually it was worn by a Polovtsian Warrior in the dances from the opera “Prince Igor,” the final and most sensationally galvanizing work of the company’s celebrated opening night in Paris. Here we see allover tights worn by women in ballet (“La Chatte” and “Ode” in the late 1920s) and modern outfits by Chanel (“The Blue Train,” 1924); here, too, are radical scenic examples of neoprimitivism, Cubism, constructivism.

Although I’ve watched Diaghilev ballets and visited Diaghilev exhibitions for more than 30 years, this show added to my knowledge, and gave several old thrills new intensity. It bestows equal honor to ballets that have stayed in repertory, from “Petrouchka” to “Prodigal”; it illumines several that did not survive Diaghilev’s death (and the subsequent closing of the company) in 1929, including “The Blue God,” “Ode” and “The Ball.” What’s more, some of its most poetically marvelous designs and costumes belong to productions that even histories of the Ballets Russes often overlook.

More than a few books in the extensive Diaghilev literature, for instance, pass over his staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “Sadko,” with designs by Goncharova. Here, however, are several of the costumes for that work’s underwater ballet — each gorgeous, none more so than one for an orange-red dancer-size sea horse, with huge head and tail, all part of a single S curve.

This exhibition, then titled simply “Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929,” opened in 2010 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which has amassed the world’s largest trove of Ballets Russes material. But it also showcases items from New York; San Antonio; Stockholm; and Canberra, Australia, as well as other cities. While some of the London items are absent here, others have been added: not least, from the National Gallery, is Modigliani’s portrait of Bakst.

No segment of dance history so lends itself to exhibition as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Diaghilev had begun his career by presenting, between 1895 and 1906, exhibitions that changed people’s views of the styles and history of art. He then applied this to opera and, finally and most famously, to ballet. Not all his stagings were riots of color — for “Les Noces,” an enduring masterpiece omitted here, the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska persuaded Goncharova to drop bright hues for plain, somber ones — but there is enough to catch the breath in room after room of this exhibition.

“Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced With Music” continues through Sept. 2 at the National Gallery of Art, Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington; (202) 737-4215, nga.gov.

Mr. Darnell, who has supervised reality programming for Fox since before the term reality show entered the lexicon, said Friday that he was leaving the network at the end of the month.

He oversaw Fox’s most popular reality shows (“So You Think You Can Dance,” “MasterChef,” “The X Factor” in addition to “Idol”) and was also its most outlandish innovator (remember “Temptation Island” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”).

Mr. Darnell and his superiors at Fox said that he was offered a new contract but decided to leave. Nonetheless, there was immediate speculation that he was a casualty of the tough television season at Fox, particularly with “American Idol.”

Fox’s audiences have fallen by more than 15 percent in the season that ends this month. For “Idol,” once the most popular show on American television, the fall has been steeper. While the slide is not necessarily surprising, since the show has been on for more than a decade, the ratings have been distressing for Fox and its parent company, News Corporation.

When the company reported first-quarter earnings, it said Fox’s ad revenue had declined in large part because of the performance of “Idol.” Now the network is contemplating a complete makeover of the show, possibly by replacing last season’s judges with a panel of “Idol” alumni like Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson. Such a move would emphasize the past star-making success of the series.

On Friday there were reports that Ms. Hudson, a finalist on the third season of “Idol,” had signed on for the next season, which will start in January; Fox declined to comment.

Mr. Darnell, in a brief telephone interview, warmly recalled the days when “Idol” drew 30 million viewers a night and acknowledged that it would “never be as big as it once was.”

But no other series will be, either, he added: “I don’t think that’s possible in television anymore,” with the exception of a few one-time events like the Super Bowl. He expressed confidence about the future of “Idol,” drawing an analogy between it and the 35-year-old “Saturday Night Live” on NBC.

“How many times have you heard that ‘S.N.L.’ is dead?” he asked. “Then a new crop comes in and it’s a big success again.”

“There’s something about these brands,” he said, asserting that “the audience wants to like them.”

Mr. Darnell, whose title is president of alternative entertainment, gained notice in the TV world for his risk-taking and exuberance. But over-the-top reality TV shows are now less the domain of broadcast networks like Fox than of niche cable channels like TLC and A&E. Mr. Darnell has not had a particularly newsworthy show in quite some time. (Franchises he helped birth, however, like “MasterChef,” continue to gain viewers and inspire spinoffs.)

“He brilliantly paved the way for all of us, creating a powerful entertainment genre that audiences can’t get enough of,” said Ryan Seacrest, the host of “American Idol.”

Mr. Darnell, 51, joined the network in 1994 as the director of specials; among the most infamous of those was “Alien Autopsy (Fact or Fiction)” in 1995. In 2000, The New York Times called him “the Svengali of sometimes gruesome, sometimes comical specials that took television to new heights — or depths — of perversity.”

Mr. Darnell said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities, without elaborating. Fox executives emphasized that it was his choice. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, said in a news release: “Mike took risks at a critical time and was a pioneering force in shaping the reality programming genre that exists today. He’s a smart and fearless executive who will be missed.”

Mr. Darnell, asked if his exit was related to “Idol’s” ratings weakness, said, “Of course not.”

“Every time my deal comes up, I go through this excruciating decision process,” he said, and this time he concluded he should leave.

“I was able to make this the Wild West,” he said, referring to Fox and its willingness to try stunt shows like “Man vs. Beast” and “World’s Scariest Police Chases.”

“But the Wild West has moved,” he added. “Cable, digital, it’s everywhere now.”

Putting “Idol” aside, he said his best show was “Joe Millionaire,” the 2003 dating competition that tricked female contestants into believing that the aforementioned Joe was a rich bachelor. Joe was actually a construction worker. About 35 million viewers tuned in for the finale.

“He was just hustling,” said Mr. Tolbert’s son, Tony. “She said he needed to have some kind of career. She said, ‘doctor, lawyer or Indian chief.’  ”

Mr. Tolbert, a high school dropout, chose option 2, and went on to become one of the first black lawyers to represent black entertainers in Hollywood and to play a central role in an early effort to improve the way blacks were portrayed on film and to increase their numbers behind the scenes.

Mr. Tolbert, who was 86 when he died on April 22 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area, grew up surrounded by entertainers. His grandfather Willis Young was an anchor of the Los Angeles jazz scene in the 1930s, and the great saxophonist Lester Young was an uncle. After he graduated from Van Norman Law School in 1959, Mr. Tolbert began building a four-decade practice rooted in his family’s connections.

His clients included the trumpeter Harry (Sweets) Edison, the actor and comedian Redd Foxx, and the singers Lou Rawls and Della Reese. Some of their success can be traced to the work Mr. Tolbert did as the young president of the Hollywood-Beverly Hills chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the early 1960s.

In June 1963, only weeks before the March on Washington, the N.A.A.C.P., mounted what some called the March on Hollywood, a political and economic campaign in which the organization promised to picket theaters, hold demonstrations and boycott major advertisers if film studios and unions did not portray blacks in more diverse roles and hire more of them to work in the industry.

At one news conference, Mr. Tolbert urged studios “to have Negroes shown as they are, instead of as caricatures,” and he challenged unions to hire at least one black worker for each production. Some unions later adopted an apprenticeship program but never implemented it, the N.A.A.C.P. said.

Some within the organization criticized Mr. Tolbert for not immediately insisting on advertising boycotts. But he portrayed himself as a moderate, preferring to press his case using practical arguments.

“We Negroes watch ‘Bonanza’ and buy Chevrolets,” he told a group of broadcast and advertising executives in August 1963. “We watch Disney on RCA sets. Jack Benny entertains us, and we buy General Foods products. Our babies eat Gerber baby foods, and we photograph them with Polaroid cameras.”

“We buy all the advertised products,” he added, “the same as you do.”

That September he noted that there had been some, if halting, progress in the kinds of roles black actors were receiving. But two years later the N.A.A.C.P.’s national labor secretary, Herbert Hill, complained that what progress had been made had been fleeting.

James Lionel Tolbert was born on Oct. 26, 1926, in New Orleans. He and two of his sisters moved to Los Angeles when he was 10. He enlisted in the Army after he dropped out of high school.

Tony Tolbert confirmed his father’s death, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to his son, Mr. Tolbert is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Ms. Ross; their daughters, Anita and Alicia; two grandchildren, and two sisters, Martha Taylor and Esther Ford.

Tony Tolbert, who is a lawyer himself and an administrator at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, said that his father’s law practice was hardly glamorous, that the entertainment work was just a facet of it. The home phone frequently rang late at night with calls from clients who had been arrested and hoped to be bailed out of jail. The Tolbert house nearly always had guests, some for a night, others for six months. Mr. Tolbert rarely said no.

It had an impact on his son. For the last two years, Tony Tolbert has made his own house in Los Angeles available to a struggling family for $ 1 a month in rent while he lives with his mother.

“He was a save-the-world kind of guy, for sure,” he said of his father.

New Yorkers for de Blasio

Cynthia Nixon speaking this month at a fund-raiser, joined by, from left, Alan Cumming, Bill de Blasio and Mr. de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray.

A couple of months ago, Cynthia Nixon sent Alec Baldwin an e-mail that had nothing to do with a potential film project, a play that either of them might have been considering or even what to do about pesky tabloid reporters (although both actors are familiar with those).

Instead, Ms. Nixon was writing because she had seen Mr. Baldwin on television discussing the New York mayoral race and saying that he was leaning against the perceived front-runner, Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, and toward Bill de Blasio, the public advocate. Ms. Nixon explained that she was thrilled to hear this and that she hoped she might be able to persuade him to deliver a formal endorsement on behalf of her candidate.

Soon enough, an e-mail came from Mr. Baldwin that Ms. Nixon later described as “completely adorable.” In it, he apologized for having assumed — “lamely,” in his words — that Ms. Nixon would be supporting Ms. Quinn (both, after all, are famous lesbians), and that he would be happy to endorse Mr. de Blasio.

Ms. Nixon’s entreaties didn’t stop with the “30 Rock” actor. Over the next several weeks, she piled up endorsements and donations from Tony Kushner, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jon Robin Baitz, among others.

She organized an LGBT benefit for Mr. de Blasio that featured gender-bending performers like Justin Bond, Flotilla de Barge and Tina Turnstyle. She is also a key member of the Women for de Blasio committee.

“There are weeks where four or five days in a row, I’m doing something with Cynthia,” Mr. de Blasio said. “She’s that fully involved with the campaign.”

None of this comes as much of a surprise to Ms. Nixon’s friends, who, over the last decade, have seen her become more and more involved with a number of high-profile progressive causes and emerge, along with Mr. Baldwin and Sean Penn, as one of the more prominent celebrity activists on the political left.

In the last two years, Ms. Nixon has traveled around the country to campaign in states where amendments to legalize gay marriage were on the ballot. She has gone to Washington to speak for Planned Parenthood and to protest rollbacks of Roe v. Wade. She went to Florida and Virginia on behalf of President Obama’s re-election effort and to Minnesota, on behalf of Al Franken, a senator from that state. “She’s not dabbling at all,” Mr. Franken said in a phone interview. “We had given her material on what I had done, but she really internalized it and put it together in her own way. She knows what she is talking about.”

And, with her spouse, Christine Marinoni, the former New York director of the Alliance for Quality Education, Ms. Nixon has been a tireless advocate for increasing financing to New York City’s public schools.

“She’s incredibly bright, and she understands that there is an opportunity for her to be a voice when others might not have that opportunity,” Ms. Parker said. “Cynthia can stand in the front at a rally and speak because she will bring attention; she will have a presence that creates curiosity.”

Ms. Nixon’s work as an activist dates back to roughly 2001, when she was on “Sex and the City” and became an advocate on behalf of public education.

She had grown up in Manhattan and had attended public schools. Her father was a radio journalist who spent much of the ’60s covering the civil rights movement, and her mother was an actress who trained with Uta Hagen.

When Ms. Nixon had children, she said she never considered sending them anywhere other than public schools. Then, a recession hit and the city was faced with budget cuts, just as Ms. Nixon’s daughter was entering kindergarten. So Ms. Nixon sprang into action. (Ms. Parker called it “kind of her gateway” into politics).

“Anything that could be cut was cut,” Ms. Nixon said last week over a late lunch at the NoHo Star, where she was sitting in a booth in a trim black peacoat from Bendel’s, a pair of fitted jeans and cowboy boots. “The school was so overcrowded, kindergarten classes were housed in trailers in the back.“

So Ms. Nixon began attending rallies — even got herself arrested protesting at City Hall. “We marched on up, sat down and blocked the entrance,” she said. “The police very politely asked us to move, and we declined. They pulled up the police van and put us in.”

Soon enough, Ms. Nixon met Ms. Marinoni, who until recently worked for the Alliance for Quality Education, as well as Mr. de Blasio.

Roland Witschel/European Pressphoto Agency

Georges Moustaki, shown performing in 1983 with the singer Marta Contreras, was known for his melancholy ballads.

PARIS — Georges Moustaki, a singer and songwriter who wrote Édith Piaf’s hit song “Milord” and won wide popularity in France for his poetic lyrics and melancholy ballads, died on Thursday in Nice, France. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Marie-Ange Mirande, who said that Mr. Moustaki had had emphysema.

His death prompted an outpouring of emotional tributes. The French president, François Hollande, called him a “hugely talented artist whose popular and committed songs have marked generations of French people.”

Mr. Moustaki, instantly recognizable by his bushy beard and long white hair, belonged to the generation of French singers — including Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Léo Ferré and Georges Brassens — who composed many of their own songs, writing lyrics with a poetic sensibility.

Mr. Moustaki started his career as a songwriter, composing about 300 songs for some of the most popular singers in France, including Ms. Piaf, Yves Montand and Serge Reggiani.

“Milord,” his first hit, told the story of a “girl from the harbor” who falls in love with an elegant Englishman. Mr. Moustaki wrote it for Ms. Piaf, and the two became lovers, though she was more than 20 years his senior. It was later interpreted by Bobby Darin and Cher.

Mr. Moustaki made his name as a singer in 1969 with “Le Métèque” — a pejorative word for foreigner — in which he described himself as a “wandering Jew” and a “Greek shepherd.” He wrote and performed many other songs, including “Ma Liberté” and “Ma Solitude.”

Mr. Moustaki, whose real name was Giuseppe Mustacchi, was born on May 3, 1934, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his parents, both of Greek origin, had emigrated. His father, Nessim, ran a bookstore that drew visitors from across the Middle East.

Mr. Moustaki first performed as a pianist and singer in Brussels and Paris, but his career took off after he met Mr. Brassens, who became his mentor, and fell in with singers of the Left Bank, including Mr. Brel and Juliette Gréco.

Mr. Moustaki’s songwriting career peaked in the 1960s and ’70s with songs like “Sarah,” performed by Mr. Reggiani, and “La Dame Brune” (“The Lady With Brown Hair”), written for the singer Barbara (Monique Serf).

He later pursued a solo career, giving concerts in Africa, Japan and the United States, including at Carnegie Hall in the early 1970s. He performed in Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Greek and grew passionate about Brazilian music.

After a 50-year career, Mr. Moustaki recorded his last album in 2008 and announced a year later that he could no longer sing because of his emphysema. He is survived by a daughter, Pia.

His philosophy was reflected in his 1973 song “Declaration”: “I declare a permanent state of happiness and the right of everyone to every privilege. I say that suffering is a sacrilege when there are roses and white bread for everyone.”

Luke Wolagiewicz for The New York Times

Visitors pay $ 27 to visit Highclere Castle, which costs $ 1.5 million a year to maintain.

WEST BERKSHIRE, England — Lady Carnarvon, a self-described “prudent Scottish accountant,” doesn’t mind buses coughing and screeching onto the gravel driveway of her country estate and depositing 1,500 fans each day at her doorstep. In fact, she eagerly welcomes the visitors to Highclere Castle who pay the $ 27 admission fee, buy the $ 14.50 guidebooks and don’t leave without souvenirs like a $ 23 polo shirt with Highclere Castle etched on the front.

Why the attraction? Lady Carnarvon’s home is the fictional setting for the TV series “Downton Abbey,” and she is determined to cash in. As she told a visitor while scrambling to find a place for lunch that wasn’t already occupied by tourists, the location fees paid for the use of Highclere “are not going to pay for the roof.”

Lady Carnarvon was known as Fiona Aitken before she married Geordie Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and Queen Elizabeth II’s godson, in 1999. She has become the face of Highclere as her husband devotes himself to the less-glamorous operational side of running this vast estate, and speaks with the proper accent of a countess and the numeric frankness of a chief financial officer. “If you win the lottery, you’re winning something called cash,” she said. “With ‘Downton,’ it’s how it can turn in to something like cash.”

The television show has brought worldwide fame to Highclere Castle (which Lady Carnarvon’s husband’s family has owned since the late 17th century), especially among what she calls “lots of lovely Americans.” But the house costs $ 1.5 million a year to run, and it has not received the windfall that viewers of the show would assume.

It certainly didn’t provide the fortune brought by Almina Wombwell, the Fifth Countess of Carnarvon and daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, who married into the family in 1895; that paid for the first electricity and plumbing. The current Lady Carnarvon recognizes that keeping a house like Highclere financially solvent and in the family is far more difficult today.

“It’s both my husband’s family home and my home, but it has to work in the modern world — it has to be a business,” she said as she finished lunch and asked her assistant to provide her something sweet. “Yes, my lady,” he said and promptly returned with a jelly doughnut.

Lady Carnarvon is such an advocate of prudent finances that she would seem to have more in common with Suze Orman than with her husband’s pedigreed relations. As she gazed out from the footmen’s rooms onto the tents on Highclere’s lawns, she talked about all her efforts to pay for Highclere Castle’s costly renovations, like running a working farm to produce horse feed and hosting events there like an Easter egg hunt that required relocating a field of lambs to make room for visitors.

In addition to bringing in more film and television companies to shoot in Highclere’s less recognizable chambers, she has rented out the home for weddings, including that of the model Katie Price, at rates starting at about $ 22,000.

A Richmond, Va.-based speaker’s bureau, Arnett & Associates, handles Lady Carnarvon’s speaking engagements, with fees starting at $ 20,000. Then there are her books. “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey,” which was published in 2011, made the New York Times best-seller list and sold a respectable 157,000 copies. (She is writing another book, about her husband’s ancestors, specifically Catherine Wendell, the American-born Sixth Countess of Carnarvon.)

Through all of this fund-raising, she still tries to make Highclere Castle feel like a real home, with magazines strewn on the night tables of bedrooms recognizable to “Downton Abbey” fans and family photographs featuring the royals strategically placed throughout common rooms. Her family spends much of its time exiled to a cottage 20 yards away, where the countess said she keeps the “dogs, rabbits, trampolines, Xbox.” That’s where on a recent afternoon, Lady Carnarvon’s son, Edward, played with her husband’s son from his first marriage, George.

“I never rest,” she said. “I am always looking for the next trick.”

Not everyone has been pleased with how she has tried to make money off Highclere. A former boyfriend, the baronet Sir Benjamin Slade (who successfully sued her in the late 1990s after their breakup over the custody of their dog, Jasper, prompting the tabloids to brand her “Feisty Fiona”), called the Carnarvons “grave robbers” for their discovery of the tombs of Tutankhamen.

Agaton Strom for The New York Times

Hoo-Ha (for your eyes only) Darrell Jones, foreground, with his collaborators, Damon Green, left, and J’Sun Howard, performing the full version of Mr. Jones’s hourlong work on Thursday at Danspace Project.

In Darrell Jones’s “Hoo-Ha (for your eyes only),” three men wear headpieces with long ponytails that whirl like helicopter blades as heads roll. They wear jeans and sneakers and silver bangles that rattle as they toss their wrists about in voguing moves. They scatter rose petals. They simulate sex.

In February 2012, when Mr. Jones presented an excerpt from the work at Danspace Project, it was an arresting and mysterious deconstruction of voguing and it made you want to see more. On Thursday, when Mr. Jones returned with his collaborators Damon Green and J’Sun Howard to present the full, hourlong dance, its power seemed diffused.

The three men perform much of “Hoo-Ha” halfheartedly, as if they were rehearsing it. Often they dance independently to the music — spinning, strutting, each man for himself. But when they lock into short-lived unison routines, the dancing is just as desultory. They stop to fan themselves in the heat. Like an actor who can’t stay in character, Mr. Jones repeatedly cracks up.

In ritual episodes, the drama is more focused. Kneeling in a square of white light, Mr. Jones and Mr. Howard take turns slapping each other, each slap harder and louder than the last. In a patch of red light, all three men lie on their backs with their pants pulled down around their ankles; as their moans rise in volume and pitch, so do their pelvises. Too many sections share this structure of crescendo.

At one point, we hear audio of a martial arts fight from the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and the juxtaposition of clanging steel and the dancers’ slashing arms as they vaguely battle is cute. (As is the lip-syncing to a scene from “The Color Purple.”)

The more engaging clashes among the trio happen further under the surface. When two are together, one is left out. Mr. Jones is controlling, directing his colleagues, launching himself into their arms and expecting to be caught. Their resentment erupts in little shoves, in petals thrown in Mr. Jones’s face.

The suggestion of sex, too, is more interesting when handled with greater subtlety than in the crescendos. A few times, the men slowly tumble together on the floor, and as one man’s mouth is suspended over another’s and one man’s head finds itself in another’s crotch, the encounter sustains tension, both intimate and detached.

Those sequences and others transpire in silence. Elsewhere, the dancers make sibilant and percussive noises with their mouths, or yell or chant the word “yes.” But mostly the sound is a fabulous mix by Justin Mitchell, a k a D. J. Swaguerilla. Starting with a long-toned rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” it feeds in ambient recordings of vogue balls, unsettling cracks and smacks, music with irresistible beats.

That music also rises in intensity. Yet the dancing, quite possibly by design, never rises to match it. Striking moments accrue, but the climax never comes.

“Hoo-Ha (for your eyes only)” continues through Saturday at Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; (866) 811-4111, danspaceproject.org.

To the north, at the top of a hill, rose a particularly oversize mansion, a conspicuously lavish property in a neighborhood full of them. “It’s so hard to shoot wealth,” Mr. Batmanglij said, gazing hungrily past tall red walls at the expansive property beyond. “It doesn’t show up on film.”

He would know. “The East,” Mr. Batmanglij’s new movie, contains both images of spectacular wealth and, more often, the opposite: abandoned homes, beach squats, railway car interiors. It’s a thriller about an operative for a private intelligence firm, Sarah (Brit Marling, who wrote the film with Mr. Batmanglij), tasked with infiltrating a militant anarchist cell that attempts revenge-style “jams” against amoral C.E.O.s and other corporate evildoers.

In the spirit of the film, perhaps, Mr. Batmanglij (pronounced baht-MANH-glihj) contemplated the property a bit further, then slipped through a gap in the wall and strolled across its elegant lawn. The opulence of it all, he said in amazement: “You wouldn’t even notice it if you were living here.”

He nodded at a bubbling fountain as he trespassed further. Wealth doesn’t feel like much of anything to those who have it, he said. “It’s like making a studio movie — you can never quite touch it.”

Mr. Batmanglij knows that sensation well, of being within reach of Hollywood without ever making it quite there. In 2011, after several frustrating years, he and Ms. Marling became Sundance darlings for their film “Sound of My Voice,” which they made independently for about $ 135,000. Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, called it “a smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.”

“Sound of My Voice” was about a pair of outsiders trying to penetrate a secretive cult, and in many ways it mirrored the feelings of its creators (Ms. Marling also starred in it). Ms. Marling and Mr. Batmanglij met as students at Georgetown University, and moved out to Los Angeles with a friend, the director Mike Cahill (“Another Earth”), after school, with vague hopes of making films and absolutely no notion of how to do that.

“I think the early stuff we were writing was really interested in that idea of infiltration,” Ms. Marling said. “This world you’re trying to infiltrate, is it bad, is it good, is it celestial, is it ordinary?”

“The East,” written around the same time as “Sound of My Voice,” has similar concerns. Much of the film’s drama concerns Sarah’s gradual seduction by the charismatic members (played by Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page and others) of the collective she’s spying on.

But “The East,” with its comparatively large, $ 6.5 million budget, likely signals the end of Ms. Marling and Mr. Batmanglij’s time as Hollywood outsiders. The director Ridley Scott, whose Scott Free produced “The East,” described Mr. Batmanglij as an artist “whose determination and talent will allow him to do anything he sets his mind to.” The film, distributed by Fox Searchlight, has the addictive rhythms of a more mainstream and commercial thriller, with the Hollywood stars and studio backing to match — yet another new form of give and take for a director who has so far made group dynamics his primary subject.

“If you really want to have an anarchist experience, make a movie with a studio,” Mr. Batmanglij said.

Mr. Batmanglij, 32, is quick to smile and has a tangle of black hair. His parents are Iranian: his mother, Najmieh, is a successful cookbook author; his father, Mohammad, publishes his wife’s books, among other titles; his younger brother, Rostam, is a member of the band Vampire Weekend and, like Zal, attributes his creative good fortune to the home he grew up in. “If there’s some secret to our success,” Rostam said, “it’s that we learned how to collaborate from our parents.”

Both brothers are gay, a realization that Mr. Batmanglij said he found challenging and liberating: “You have to let go of the fantasy or the projection of your life and accept the life that you are living communally.”

But, Mr. Batmanglij added: “It’s awesome to be part of a gay family. Right now, my brother and I can focus on our work, our creative work, and our parents can support that. These are our weddings.”

Communal living is both the subject of “The East” — in a harrowing scene, straitjacketed members of the collective are asked to find a way to feed one another — and the method by which it was made. In 2009, penniless and without prospects, Mr. Batmanglij and Ms. Marling undertook a “buy nothing” summer of hopping trains and befriending anarchists. Many of those experiences, like a night in a town Mr. Batmanglij won’t specify spent playing spin the bottle, made it into “The East.”

The film was shot in Shreveport, La., in and around a dilapidated nightclub downtown. The cast and crew cooked together, and sometimes lived together.

“One of the nicest things about shooting ‘The East’ was getting to lie in dirt between takes,” Ms. Page said. “That’s like my dream, basically.”

Having the Oscar-nominated Ms. Page (for “Juno”) on the set, Mr. Batmanglij admitted, was probably a sign that his days outside the studio system were numbered. Certainly Hollywood was no longer an abstraction. “You know, you think it’s so cool to have movie stars in your movie,” he said, “but they become people.”

Mr. Batmanglij gestured toward the property where he’d been trespassing. “You can’t have that house,” he said, and similarly “You can’t enjoy what it’s like to make a movie,” because the experience doesn’t present itself that coherently. “When I was a kid, I used to fly in airplanes and just look at the clouds and say I wanted to live in a house in the clouds. But you can’t live in a cloud.”