Deconstructing the craft of The Zone of Interest
So, why are you interested in making this?
Entering the fray of the Holocaust film has always been a contentious choice for filmmakers, even more so when setting the action within the death camps. There's a need to prove that the approach to the setting is worthwhile, and that it will not be utilising the trauma of the period as emotional fodder. It is generally considered exploitative if a filmmaker is considered to be using the period as a shortcut to the audience’s emotional circuitry. Many of these films have had some sort of “gimmick” whether narratively, stylistically, or subject matter-wise, to announce itself as being worthy of tackling the subject anew.
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest sits on the line of this tricky balance, with Glazer and team approaching its portrayal of the Auschwitz death camp and its Commandant with a deliberately arthouse approach, attempting to treat the material with as little sensationalism as possible. However, while Glazer’s film employs dissonance for audience effect, the effect of its stylistic choices are fundamentally discordant with its postured intentions. It is a film at odds with itself: pretending to tread lightly when it does not; projecting intellectualism when it has nothing new to say.
As presented, The Zone of Interest is detached and unemotional. Its chief function is to depict the Commandant and his family as a seemingly regular family who happen to be living next to and also responsible for the taking of human lives. Sandra Hüller's character barely regards what happens beyond her backyard walls, which are actually the walls to Auschwitz. She is more concerned with the beauty of her garden, while her husband considers better operational procedures for mass murder in the living room.
We know all of this from the synopsis of the film, pulled from Letterboxd:
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
For me, filmgoing tends to be an affair of looking for an emotional experience. While the film’s approach is detached, its emotional response comes from a precise dissonance rather than from the construction of an emotional arc or narrative. We know of the horrors within the camp’s walls. The film alludes to them and is dependent on your knowledge of the Holocaust to imagine horrors beyond the walls. However, what does the film achieve in its existence and specific construction that the knowledge of its context does not already achieve on its own?
While the film is effective in its supposed chief purpose to unsettle, especially with its use of sound design, there are stylistic choices here that have me questioning the film's approach to the material. These questions primarily stem from the gulf between the film's actual effect on me as compared to what Glazer has intended.
Inverted vision and intention
One recurring stylistic device is the use of thermal cameras to show a Polish girl leaving food for the prisoners in their work sites. Glazer explains the use of the thermal camera in a Vanity Fair interview which you can read an excerpt of here. Glazer makes repeated mentions of how he wants to present the film in “the present tense” with 21st century equipment, as plainly and starkly as possible. Conceptually speaking, capturing these sequences without lighting is as realistic as possible a situation to film, however presenting them as thermal signatures is as far from realistic as we can see it with our own eyes.
These are alien sequences, and as much as I want to read into the Polish girl as a sort of “light in the darkness”, the immediate sensorial experience is more disconcerting than inspiring. There’s an otherworldliness to her depiction which is in contrast to the banal evil we see. As a piece of the whole, it is a discombobulating stylistic choice. What does it mean to have her presence be the off-putting while presenting the life of the Hoss’ as mundane? I think this disconnect is telling, because it shows that Glazer is more interested in his act of capturing rather than the audience's act of seeing. Films are primarily made to be seen.
This is on top of the fact that, as a technological device, it is anachronistic of the time. It is the present tense of today, not the present tense of yesterday. While I know he is trying to draw a throughline to the present tense of today conceptually speaking; i.e. the horrors of today echo the horrors of yesterday, etc– this is not an argument that is necessarily in the text of the film.
Sound and the approximation of reality
I find this idea of “presenting things in the present tense” does not align with quite a number of the tools that Glazer uses in his film: basic cinematic language he utilises that interrupt his approach to crafting the film as if it were filmed reality.
In the sound department, you have voiceovers, and phone calls playing out over other action instead of the people on the phone themselves. These are specifically not filmed reality. In one scene, we hear the Commandant's voice on the phone with his wife while watching him look over a party that he is bored by, the subject of his phone call. We are entering a subjective reality here, both experiencing an event (the phone call) and observing what it is referencing at the same time (the party). This is not the camera capturing events as it unfolds. It is a storytelling device, used to juxtaposed disparate elements in a way that only cinema can. These choices subtly heighten the story of the Commandant and his wife, bringing us away from reality towards cinematic storytelling, an approach that tends towards character alignment. Glazer's supposedly objective presentation of events becomes a subjective one, from the perspective of the Commandant. While such sonic devices are not inherently wrong per se, they interrupt the stylistic patterning of the film (supposed objectivity) in a manner that does not feel tuned to any specific purpose.
I think the one aspect that we can easily applaud The Zone of Interest for is its sound design and mix. It is eerie, strange, and effective in crafting a mood of disturbing dread. It is also telling that this is the least flashy of the devices employed by Glazer and his team, and it is also one of the most fundamental elements of filmmaking. There are few gimmicks here aside from being a well honed combination of sonic elements. A low hum that pervades the whole film, alluding to the constant whir of the machinery of death next door. Sudden sharp screams and wails that pierce the sonic fabric to suggest singular deaths among a countless many.
While there's obviously no need for sound design to be literally real, it is itself an exercise in approximating objective and emotional reality. These soundscapes are equally crafted to create an emotional reality based on what you might be able to hear. Devices like voiceovers do not approximate reality, they are specifically used to give a subjective experience, creating an emotional reality from what you would not be able to hear. It feels like splitting hairs to make these distinctions, but we are so used to the basic building blocks of the moving image accompanied by sound that these effects bypass logical processing; we feel these things without knowing it.
Thomas Flight has a great video breaking down the sound design of the film, and how it is both an invisible but perceptible element of the film: we feel like the film is somehow different from a typical one. The sounds feel more grounded, more rooted in reality, at least relative to our experience watching other films. The sounds are not real, but they give the impression of reality.
Avoiding the “artifice of cinema”
Another approach that Glazer employs to “avoid the artifice of cinema” is to shoot the house with cameras embedded in the set and “no film lighting” so that the actors can embody these characters within a more realistic environment. Take a look at this behind the scenes featurette:
Creating a believable home, more so than a typical set, is merely a means to aid performance and it is impossible to gauge the effectiveness of those means aside from the quality of the outcome (i.e. the performance itself) and that relationship is not necessarily causal. An actor’s craft is an internal one, and a director’s job is to craft a suitable environment for the actor to create believable imagined realities within themselves such that their outward performance approximates reality. However, many actors have turned in immensely believable performances in typical or perhaps even more challenging acting scenarios.
If Glazer’s intention is to present his manufactured reality as a very close approximation of a true one, is that something we can perceive as the audience without the knowledge of the film’s intention? On the visual front, the noteworthy cinematic choice is that many shots are perpendicular to a wall, as a result of cameras being bolted to walls around the home. The consequence of this stylistic choice is a rigid display of home life, turning interior spaces into boxy showrooms.
However, this depiction of mundane family life still utilises cuts as we are articulated throughout the house’s rooms and gardens. With the use of cuts between rooms, it is difficult to ascertain the utility of all these behind the camera machinations. Even with the oddities of its schematic depiction of events, the film still operates like any other movie with frequent cuts around the home. It does not feel more real than any other film. No matter how well Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig Höss, we rationally know she is playing a part on a set, but we wilfully and automatically suspend our disbelief for the sake of receiving a story: it’s what our brains are inclined to do. That is to say, The Zone of Interest approximates reality just as well as any other film, to purport it does it to a more significant extent due to some elaborate method of cinematic craft that is invisible to the audience feels like marketing.
All films are artificial. The entire point of the craft (and this applies to documentary and reality television as well) is to blur the boundaries between artifice and reality, so that you believe what’s happening in front of you emotionally. You know what you’re looking at is not real. You know Glazer did not film the real Höss family.
If the film's chief purpose to present an objective reality crumbles, does it actually achieve anything else? There's nothing wrong with the use of these devices in any case, but it puts into relief the glaring lack of purpose in approaching the film in this way when making it. Why go to all the trouble to ape reality when you're going to cut and sound design in a way that bends reality anyway?
The future is present, the present is past
Late in the film, Glazer cuts abruptly from Rudolf wandering a deserted hallway to, finally, the inside of the death camp, except now in the present. We watch as staff clean and prepare the site for visitors. The exhibits show the remnants of the many who have died there: shoes, crutches, clothes, and the like. This cut into present “documentary reality” further puts what we have seen before into the realm of artifice, a drastic act of de-immersion jolting the viewer into the present, after spending an hour and a half intending to present the past as present. I can only guess at Glazer’s intentions at this choice. Maybe it is to remind us of the actual atrocities the Höss’ family was both responsible and literally next to despite the near quotidian hour and a half that precedes this cut.
However, so disturbing is this consequence that the cut travels back in time to cause Rudolf’s stomach in the past to churn and his throat to choke on the horror of his work. In doing so, does this not also in effect redeem Rudolf a tiny bit? That even he can feel the moral weight of his work, when Glazer’s whole intention has been to present this evil as mundane? It is a confounding contradiction of intention.
There's a fundamental rift between Glazer's intentions and his film's effect on an audience. So many of the film's choices and marketing come through as “dressing” to marshal it as an “important” arthouse film with a fresh approach to the Holocaust film. However, the fact is that the film is not saying anything new about the Holocaust at all. It merely uses it as a site for stylistic experimentation. These moments that mess with the continuity and contiguity of time and space are relatively novel to the film's stylistic patterning and they disturb Glazer’s intentions of objective reality. The result is that it feels as if he has constructed an elaborate Nazi dollhouse, and he is playing with it.
Notes
For an eloquent deconstruction of the film, read Richard Brody’s review on The New Yorker.
Oddly relevant, Deep Cut just released an episode discussing one of the all-time best movies, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, and there’s a section where we discuss the artificiality of cuts, and how being “anti-cut” helps to approximate reality. A cut always creates a moment of artifice.
It's been more than a month since my last piece, but hopefully I can pick up the pace again. There's a lot of movies to watch in November and December with the current Edward Yang retrospective happening at the Asian Film Archive, and the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival which I'll be covering in some capacity.
Tr*mp just got his second term in The White House. It feels ironic to be writing about Nazis this week, when a new era of fascism continues to turn its gears. It hurts.