Jonathan Glazer’s film about life behind the Auschwitz wall
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The online premiere of “Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glazer took place on streaming platforms. The experimental drama, which received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and five Oscar nominations, tells the story of how comfortable it is to live next to Auschwitz.
Three years ago there was an open field here, and now we have a garden, a swimming pool, a greenhouse; Frau Hedwig Hess proudly shows her wonderful house to her mother who has come to stay. Here we have vegetables – beds of rosemary, kohlrabi and fennel, a row of tall sunflowers. And this – yes, this is a wall separating us from my husband’s work, we planted grapes along it, in another year or two – and the greenery will completely cover it. It is very convenient for my husband, the commandant of Auschwitz, to go to work: you come out of the gate, enter the gate – and you are already there. The bees provide us with fresh honey, the camp prisoners provide us with clothes, toothpaste (you can even find diamonds in the tubes!), and, in fact, teeth.
The film by the British Jonathan Glazer “Zone of Interest” tells about the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess, who lived with his wife Hedwig and five children right next to the camp wall. The house was connected to the camp by an underground corridor. There is a series of photographs taken by Hess that show his children playing serenely, receiving guests, and Hedwig in the garden. The only thing missing from these photographs is the wall between the garden and Auschwitz. Glaser deliberately turns the camera so that this wall is visible almost constantly.
She’s completely new. Everything was built recently – a perfect house, a perfect wall, nothing has yet become dilapidated, nothing has become a thing of the past. Glaser warns: this is a film not about the past, but about the present. About what is happening now.
The director has long wanted to make a film about the Holocaust – but not from the point of view of the victims. He is interested in the very banality of evil – what Hannah Arendt defined as bureaucratic zeal, “horrifying normality,” unquestioning submission to inhuman laws. In all his films there is a physically tangible draft of the transcendental – and the heroine of the sci-fi thriller “Be in my shoes” almost no different from the heroine of “Zone of Interest”. Okay, at least the first one has curiosity about those she devours. Hedwig Hess has no time to be curious, she has too much work, she lives the ideal life she has always dreamed of. Children grow up in the air, as expected, strong, healthy, happy. The party said that we need to find our own space, and here she, Hedwig, found such a space. She grabbed onto him. She won’t leave, even if her husband is promoted and sent somewhere else.
Martin Amis’s novel Zone of Interest (2014) was Glaser’s starting point, but if Amis, like Jonathan Littell eight years before him in The Benefactors, did his best to fictionalize the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant, to make them more fascinating (or disgusting) , then Glaser did the opposite job: he cleared the story of drama, of plot, of fascination. Glaser deliberately made films about the absence of strong human feelings. No love triangles like Amis. Just the daily routine, garden, children.
Yes, this heavenly life goes wrong every now and then, you can’t relax. A mother who has come to stay can suddenly pack her things and leave without saying anything – and if she had stayed even a little longer, she would probably have stopped paying attention to the screams and shots behind the wall. Ashes from the camp may be thrown into the river where children bathe, and then the children will have to be washed for a long time, and then the bathtub will have to be cleaned. A dog can shit in the house.
This is actually a film about how difficult it is to clean everything up. Clean up. This is not a metaphor. The truth is very difficult. How many people are needed to take care of a large house, a garden, to wipe off dog shit, to clean boots, to dig manure for a garden, to wash away human ashes from a bathtub. How many people does it take to dispose of other people? So that everything works without failures – heating, cooling, unloading, loading.
This is a beautifully designed, very efficient factory for recycling – consider waste. Rudolf Hess is sincerely trying to improve the operation of the conveyor, he does not hear screams and shots, he himself is not entirely a person, but part of a machine, part of a system. Glaser wanted to make a movie that would show that all of us who dream of cultivating our garden are, emotionally and politically, much closer to crime than we would like to think.
And so that the viewer does not forget about this for a second, Glaser and composer Micah Levy weave the film’s sound lining, a clot of unalloyed darkness. The first minutes of “Zone of Interest” – a black screen and distorted music – are just a preface to the sonic hell that awaits the viewer: “we wanted to tune the viewer’s hearing before they tuned their vision.” Barking dogs, screams, occasional shots – all this quickly becomes a familiar background for both the inhabitants of the Hess house and the audience of the film.
The director did not do without formal techniques – the film is divided into three parts, in front of each part there are black, red, white screens with off-screen music; Twice in the film there appear black-and-white episodes turned negative: a girl leaves apples at night where the prisoners work. It feels like these episodes were filmed with an X-ray machine and not with a movie camera. Off-screen at this time, Hess reads a fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel to the children, and the old witch is put on a shovel and sent to the oven.
The next morning someone will be killed for these apples. The next morning someone will be sent to the oven.
For Glaser, this girl is an angel, she is the opposite of the Hesses, so he deliberately turned the image inside out. He is trying with all his might to avoid psychologism, to avoid emotionality, to avoid the clichés characteristic of films about the Holocaust – and, perhaps, goes to the other extreme, turning the “Zone of Interest” into an anthropological study, emotionally blackmailing the viewer not with footage of children suffering, but with footage , in which children are happy.
But its goal is not to shock the viewer. His goal is to let the viewer recognize himself, to show where Auschwitz begins. Here, these are people. They live well. You also want to live well.
“Zone of Interest” is deliberately filmed as a reality show rather than a psychological study of evil. Ten cameras were hidden in the house – an exact replica of the Hess home, located a few meters from the real house where Rudolf lived with his family – the actors never knew which camera they were filming with. In Walk in My Shoes he already used hidden cameras, it always works. Both Glaser and cinematographer Lukasz Žal (“Ida” “Cold War”) wanted to deprive the film of “on-screen psychology.”
In Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul, a drama also about death camps without clichéd sentimentality, the camera was myopic, everything around the hero was out of focus. In “Zone of Interest,” on the contrary, there are no close-ups, everything is shot in medium. Once or twice, in different rooms, the viewer sees everything strictly from above – and this is never the view of God, it is always the view of a security camera. Only once does the camera get very close to Hess’s face – and this is the only shot where we see Hess at work. Against a background of black smoke. He is emotionless.
Actors, deprived of the opportunity to “play with their faces,” become part of the landscape, an extension to their own home. Massive, silent Christian Friedel (“Babylon Berlin”) seems like a well-oiled machine – until, after accidentally looking into the future, he starts vomiting on the stairs. Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”), the “Queen of Auschwitz”, would be completely devoid of individuality – an ideal Frau, a pure Aryan – if not for her duck gait, swollen ankles, the clumsiness of a person who is not yet accustomed to living in paradise.
Glaser says he wanted to make a warning film. It’s very easy to become an overseer: you just need to work hard, want a good future for your children, don’t listen to what’s happening behind the wall, cultivate a garden, fish. And have time to jump out of the river when human ashes float by.
The river is very fast.
Very fast.
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