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The terrible nature of the German death factories and the incomprehensible extent of the suffering of their victims still fascinate filmmakers to this day, so much so that they try to bring more testimonies, more stories of human tenacity, more testimonies that try to convey the scale of the event in a way that largely defies our imagination.
Cinematography reacted to it soon and it is worth remembering that the Czech footprint in the reflection of the Shoah is very significant. In 1948, the theater director Alfréd Radok made Daleka cestu, a film directly reflecting the transport of Jewish civilians, their controlled dehumanization and suffering behind the walls of the Terezín concentration camp. The film stood out for its time with its bold, technically sophisticated and expressive directorial means in working with the actors and the front-of-camera space.
Radok also innovatively used scenes from prominent Nazi documents, including Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Triumph of the Will, and inserted them into a fictional plot in the form of parallel montage, revealing one form of the Nazi regime’s aesthetic lie. Some scenes, such as the arrival of the typhus train in Terezín or the swaying crowd marching in the rain to the sound of an out-of-tune band to the gates of the camp, are still among the most impressive images of events completely out of joint.
In its time, the film met a similar fate as, for example, Jiří Weil’s innovative autobiographical novel Life by a Star, in which the writer recounts from a personal perspective the fate of one of the insignificant Jewish civilians, for whom existence was reduced to a few basic actions and an endless wait for a summons to transport. The communist nomenclature denounced these peculiar views as anti-socialist thinking and defeatism and locked them in a safe for many years.
Radok and Weil managed to capture the essentially anti-heroic nature of the whole event, which degraded human beings to items moved by a monstrous system from place to place to inevitable death. The oft-cited banality of evil here lies in how inhuman acts become part of everyday life to the point that one can develop immunity to them. In one of the passages of Weil’s novel, we follow the main character Josef Roubíček on his tram journey through springtime Prague. While he is dealing with inevitable death and fighting for every morsel of bread, the Czechs around are enthusiastically conversing about whether they will go to the swimming pool and then to the cinema.
It is this unimaginable juxtaposition of two worlds, one of which is devoid of any normality and the other of which is oblivious to its joyful and gray routines, that the British director Jonathan Glazer used in his new film Zone of Interest – he just put it in a place where the camera has not looked before. To the neat and carefully maintained household of Auschwitz extermination camp commander Rudolf Höss, where his wife Hedwig and a large chorus of servants maintain order with the steady hand of the housekeeper.
Hey man!
The change in the lens through which the viewer can view mass slaughter corresponds with a certain revisionism and the break of some younger generation filmmakers with heroic humanism, best captured by Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. In 2015, the Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes came out with a strongly critical voice towards this classic work, who bluntly called it fake and pathetic. His debut Son of Saul, which won an Oscar and a big prize at Cannes, was as radical in its perspective as Zone of Interest.
In Nemes’ film, the viewer was deprived of the comfort of aesthetic metaphors and narrative schemes, but found himself face to face with Saul Ausländer, who serves in Auschwitz as a member of the auxiliary Sonderkommando. Here, the monstrosity of the Holocaust moves to the background, to the blur and the sound component, while the camera remains close to the figure of an ordinary person who is trying to survive and is fixated with his whole being on the necessity of burying the body of a child who may or may not be his son. The terrifying urgency of the film is that it offers no comforting escape and artificial hope. The viewer and the character are close and distant at the same time, everything we don’t see is completed by our imagination. Auschwitz thus suddenly becomes a much closer and more authentic experience.
Even in this change of perspective, from which a clear link leads to the Zone of Interest, we find a distinct Czech footprint. Nemes repeatedly mentions how important Jan Němek’s 1964 film Démanty noci was for him, this desperate, almost unspoken fugue of two Jewish prisoners fleeing a transport.
Glazer goes even further in the Zone of Interest than Nemes. While for him the space of the concentration camp omnipresently surrounded the hero Saul, for the characters of the new film it is really only a backdrop somewhere behind the wall, which is reminded of its constant industrial mantra of rumbling, escaping steam, desperate cries of suffering and barking dogs.
Photo: Aerofilms
Garden of Eden near Auschwitz concentration camp.
A garden fertilized by the dead
Inspired by the book of the same name by Martin Amis, the work is a methodical study focusing on the characters of Rudolf Höss, the executive head of the death factory and father of the family, and his wife Hedwig, who has found her dream living space (Hitler’s key term Lebensraum) in a hard-to-understand constellation. And just a few steps away from the most horrific genocide in human history, she is building a dream home for her children built on order, obedience, luxury and the floral compositions of the Garden of Eden, as she enthusiastically describes her Polish homestead.
We see and hear only distant fragments of the horrors of Auschwitz. His terrifying methodicality is presented, for example, in the scene in which the blasé engineer presents Höss with a new, more efficient crematorium. The human beings who are reduced to ashes daily are referred to here as “items”, and the film offers no relief in the form of depicting the Jewish prisoners as beings of flesh and blood. With the exception of a few mechanically marching helpers in the garden, the Jews turn out to be the remote source of the handsome fur coats and lipstick with which Hedwig adorns herself, and the gold teeth with which the Höss children play.
This radical concept of the painful absence, yet the omnipresence of suffering, is reinforced by the way the film is shot by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal. The scenes from the Höss residence seem to lack depth, a third dimension, everything is grotesquely and suffocatingly crowded together. The buildings and watchtowers of the concentration camp are in the distance, but in some ways they still push to the fore, similar to the monstrous sound design of Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers and the distorted cacophonous accompaniment of Mica Levi.
Scenes from the idyllic nature surrounding the camp offer more room to breathe, even if it too is contaminated by evil. Especially because the Höss ensemble, people with a minimum of emotions and means of expression, moves in it as well. The dramatic core of the film is built on the repetition of everyday scenes and on the motif of trying to maintain an ideal home, which is threatened after Höss is recalled from Auschwitz back to the Reich.
Photo: Aerofilms
Rudolf Höss in the movie Zone of Interest.
The dehumanization and grotesque bourgeois emptiness of the family, which lives immediately next to immeasurable suffering, but admits it remotely only when the wind blows in the wrong direction, is occasionally disturbed by passages in inverted black and white, in which we watch a Polish girl hiding food from prisoners. A distant reminder that humanity has not yet completely died out.
History behind glass and walls
There is something radical and comfortable about the concept that Jonathan Glazer has chosen. Höss himself was a real monster. He did not back down from his managerial rhetoric even after the war, and on the verge of death by hanging, he was one of the few to describe the workings of Auschwitz in a shared way, while delegating the moral failure exclusively to his superiors.
For the camera, he and his family are a grateful object to the extent that the viewer becomes a voyeur of what is essentially a horror collective of beings without conscience and expected emotions. These shine through mainly in the fleetingly hinted moments of sleepwalking of one of the daughters and during a visit to Hedwicz’s mother, for whom the backdrop of the smoking factory of killing becomes unbearable, but without being able to say it out loud.
The Zone of Interest is thus a consistent metaphor for the industrialization of death, the perverted nature of the idea of Lebensraum, which has always grown on the bones of the dead, but also a somewhat shallow statement of the banality of evil. Thanks to this, one can get used to the burdensome urgency in a similar way as the film’s heroes get used to the noise and smell of Auschwitz. The suppression of psychology and the remote observation of the Höss routine gives space to disconnect from the film and truly observe it as a masterfully filmed and soundtracked installation about the consistent cognitive dissonance of man in relation to the moral consequences of his actions.
Photo: Aerofilms
Zone of interest.
A certain artificiality of the whole structure shines through when the film takes a turn and moves from Auschwitz for a moment to the Reich, where Höss becomes “just” an inspector who no longer experiences the intoxicating feeling of power over life and death. It is here that Glazer attempts a strong catharsis when, by breaking down the fourth wall, he exposes the Nazi leader to the present, in which Auschwitz has become a museum that represents its victims with the things they left behind. There is something peculiarly convulsive, artificial in this creative gesture, an attempt to give the viewer at least some satisfaction in a film built on denying him.
The Zone of Interest is undoubtedly an essential and necessary work, as it reminds us of the industrial bestiality of the Nazi regime through strong filmic means. The central image of the Garden of Eden on the brink of hell will undoubtedly go down as one of the most striking scenes from humanity’s dark hour. Nevertheless, the Zone of Interest remains somewhat of a prisoner of its own concept, which is coldly beautiful, precise and, in some ways, perhaps too introspective.
2024-02-15 15:30:38
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