[/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ZONE OF INTEREST IS MUCH MORE THAN A HOLOCAUST FILM  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
February 2, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Zone of Interest isn’t just a film about Nazis. This is a film
about us. _

A garden party in Jonathan Glazer's chilling film The Zone of
Interest. , A24

 

If you read many reviews of _The Zone of Interest_, whether (mostly)
raves or (a few) pans, the amazing thing you see is how many critics
believe this is primarily a film about the twisted psychology of the
Nazis and the Final Solution. A more artfully crafted one than most,
but it’s that and nothing more.

However, this isn’t just a film about Nazis. This is a film about
us. Surely that’s obvious? Director Jonathan Glazer is known for his
formally bold choices in earlier works like _Sexy Beast_ (2000)
and _Under the Skin_ (2013), which make each of his films an event.
In _The Zone of Interest_, for example, he holds on blank screens —
we gaze at black screens or, at one point, a blood-red one — for
what seems like minutes. The suddenly empty screen is a time-honored
cinematic device that goes back to militant leftist Third Cinema works
of the 1960s and ’70s, at least, and is designed to force audiences
to reflect on what they’ve seen and become aware of their own
participation in creating what’s intended to be the radicalizing
experience of the film. The use of this device in _The Zone of
Interest_ gives us plenty of grim time to think about what the film
is showing us, and what it’s not showing us, and what the
implications are for our own lives.

The whole movie centers on the most extreme form of living in denial
about genocide, even when it’s so close that it’s occurring on the
other side of a wall. While we watch Nazi family members cheerfully
weed gardens and entertain friends and take dips in the pool and lead
their deliberately oblivious lives right next to the Auschwitz prison
camp, we’re given a great deal of time to think about how much
easier it is to ignore genocide when it’s occurring, say, on another
continent thirteen hours away by plane. The whole ghastly effect
of _The Zone of Interest_ is in making us aware of how persistently
we’re willing to live in a state of convenient denial of mass
slaughter, even with full knowledge of our own complicity in it.
We’re doing it right now.

This isn’t just a film about Nazis. This is a film about us.

If you won’t take my word for the intended impact of the film, you
might take the director’s. Glazer is saying in every interview,
“This is not about the past, it’s about now.” He began work on
the film responding to the scary international rise in right-wing
populism and antisemitism, but since then events have overtaken its
release. The October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel occurred while advance
screenings of _The Zone of Interest_ were taking place, and the
Israeli decimation of Gaza and the massacre of its people are ongoing
while the film plays in theaters. Glazer, who is Jewish, notes his
own personal
[[link removed]] stake
in the film, and states:

The sickening thing about this film is it’s timely and it’s always
going to be timely until we can somehow evolve out of this cycle of
violence that we perpetuate as human beings. And when will that
happen? Not in our lifetime.

_The Zone of Interest_ shows us in minute detail the orderly,
affluent lives of the camp commandant of Auschwitz and his family, who
live mostly happily on the grounds, separated from the ovens and gas
chambers by a high wall. But they’re able to see top of the guard
tower and the firing up of the crematorium smokestacks, and they’re
able to hear a near-constant cacophony of the noise of routinized
slaughter in the form of grinding machinery, gunshots, shouts, and
screams woven into a complex soundtrack of horror.

The film’s narrative is very loosely based on a 2014 novel by Martin
Amis, which inspired nearly ten years of dedicated research by
writer-director Glazer into Amis’s source material: the actual lives
of Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig
(Sandra Hüller), and their five children. They really did live on the
grounds of the death camp during World War II. Their comfortable home
was painstakingly recreated in a building on location in Auschwitz,
and fitted up with multiple hidden cameras so that the actors were
generally being filmed from many angles, giving much of the final form
of the film a creepy quality of anonymous observation.

Though we never get past the wall to see the mass killings inside,
just as Hedwig and the children never breach the wall to Rudolf’s
“workplace” where he goes each day in the shortest possible
commute. But the film brings the effects of what’s happening in
“the zone of interest” ever closer to the family and to us. We see
Hedwig trying on a fur coat and putting on lipstick that we slowly
grasp has been taken from one of the Jewish women brought into the
camp. We’re appalled at the source of the ashes being used to
fertilize Hedwig’s blooming gardens. Rudolf takes the children for a
swim in the nearby stream only to have to shoo them out in alarm when
he spots human remains floating downstream.

_THE ZONE OF INTEREST_ IS GENUINELY EXCEPTIONAL AS A CINEMATIC FEAT.

It’s also during the night that we see a young Polish woman
bicycling around the camps on a perilous mission, hiding apples at the
camp worksites to be found by the starving prisoners

And the effects on human psychology are on increasingly open display
as well. As Rudolf makes his nightly rounds in the house, turning off
lights, he keeps encountering in ever more disturbing moments one of
his small daughters sleepwalking, looking like a troubled ghost.
Before bed, one of his sons plays with sets of human teeth that are
presumably a gift from his father. Even the family dog evinces a
perpetual state of low-level unease. He’s in a constant state of
restlessness as he’s shut out of rooms and nudged out of people’s
way.

But the far greater emphasis is on how easy — not how uneasy — the
family’s lives are.

Hedwig comes unstrung not because of the ghastliness of their
situation but because Rudolf is told he’s being transferred from
this paradise. Though the transfer seems at first like a career
failure, it’s actually a promotion that puts him in charge of all
the camp commandants in Poland, in recognition of his efforts to make
the machinery of death work more efficiently. It seems Rudolf and
Hedwig have struggled to rise to their present status. “We’re
living as we dreamed we would!” she exclaims.

Hedwig’s come to love her position as “the queen of Auschwitz,”
and refuses to consider any other way of life. She shows off her
luxurious house complete with Polish servants and expansive grounds to
her visiting mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), who says proudly,
“You’ve certainly landed on your feet, my girl.”

A former cleaning woman, Linna blandly wonders if one of her Jewish
employers might be in the camp on the other side of the wall at that
moment. They speculate briefly about what went on in the life of that
woman. “Oh, Bolshevik stuff, probably,” says Hedwig dismissively.
“Jewish stuff.”

Though Linna seems unbothered by the idea of Jews she once worked for
imprisoned and perhaps murdered a short distance away, we see her in
the night watches, looking at the red glow beyond the window curtains,
and peering out the window at the flames shooting up from the
smokestacks. Hedwig wakes up one day to find that her mother has
departed during the night without saying goodbye, and then rips up the
note Linna left behind without showing it to anyone. We’re left to
imagine what her mother has written.

It’s also during the night that we see a young Polish woman
bicycling around the camps on a perilous mission, hiding apples at the
camp worksites to be found by the starving prisoners. Glazer based
her
[[link removed]] on
an actual local named Alexandria that he interviewed shortly before
her death at age ninety. She’d been a twelve-year-old working for
the Polish resistance, and the bicycle and the girl’s dress used in
the film actually belonged to her.

Glazer and Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal used thermal
photography for most of the scenes, so that she looks like a brightly
lit animated drawing in a black landscape. Glazer noted
[[link removed]]:

I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: “I’m getting out. I
can’t do this. It’s just too dark.” It felt impossible to just
show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and
I found it in her. She is the force for good.

Żal has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography,
one of five earned by the film that also include Best Picture, Best
International Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
It’s worth noting that, though Sandra Hüller is nominated as Best
Actress for _Anatomy of a Fall_, she also deserves it for her
chilling performance as Hedwig, with her all too ordinary human
ambitions and her tunnel vision in pursuing them.

Though there are longstanding jokes about the obligatory yearly Oscar
nominations for films about the Holocaust, _The Zone of Interest_ is
one that’s genuinely exceptional as a cinematic feat. Glazer’s
work is always formally compelling, especially when trying to capture
scenes of alienation edging toward horror. I still remember with stark
clarity many disquieting images from his last film, _Under the Skin_,
which I haven’t seen since it was playing in theaters in 2013.

So if you’re serious about film as well as the evocation of how we
tend to live in a common state of proximity to human atrocity, hurry
out to see _The Zone of Interest_ while it’s still in theaters.
The big screen and the cavernous darkness and your undivided attention
are necessary to the experience.

_Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, hosts of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA._

* Film
[[link removed]]
* Film Review
[[link removed]]
* 'The Zone of Interest'
[[link removed]]
* Jonathan Glazer
[[link removed]]
* nazism
[[link removed]]
* Holocaust
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* Germany
[[link removed]]
* oncentartion camps
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[/contact/submit_to_portside?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [/faq?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Manage subscription [/subscribe?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Visit portside.org [/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]