The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

[pistolwink]

Sounds like he’s just really proud of Schindler’s List and still rates it to this day. I guess false modesty isn’t Spielberg’s thing!

He submitted a copy of the film to Cal State Long Beach in order to procure the BA degree he abandoned in the 60’s

"Great film, but you still need three credits in math, a humanities elective, and a certificate indicating minimal fluency in one foreign language."

[TMDaines]

After seeing the film last night, my initial reaction was one as much of bafflement as contemplation. That said, it has since dictated my thoughts in the waking hours since and is most definitely the film I want to rewatch from my most recent first viewings.

I couldn't escape the fact that we were watching this in a smaller screening room in my local arthouse, whilst Dune was blaringly away next door. At times I started to doubt whether certain sounds were of the concentration camp next door, or were the deep rumbling of the sandworms.

Saw the film yesterday, and I have yet to unlock that cutaway to contemporary Auschwitz.

I saw those scenes as continuity of the hired/enslaved help in the Hoess household. At one point, Hediwg explictly mentions that the help are all local women, and "not Jews, God no", or something to that extent.

So many of the scenes within the Hoess household focus on the help preparing, cleaning and tidying the home. Now the same, presumably local women, are doing the same rhythmatic duties to now keep the actual concentration camp prim and proper for visitors (largely from wealthier socio-economic classes closer to the Hoess's own, rather than those who work as maids or cleaners in small town Poland). I think the continuity of the same mudane, banal, cleaning and tidying chores are the point.

[accatone]

I found the young/er house/home help behavier extremly unsetteling and quite different to the womens cleaning the now "museum". But all points above make sense, i do not want to argue!
I have not read the Amis book but only a few weeks ago i re-read the Höß "autobiographical notes" again that he wrote in prison prior to his sentenced to death. Just in case, its available in a commented edition here in Germany through a serious publishing house (DTV-Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag)! I found many many (most?) details translated into this film. As per this interview, german only, the Amis book did not play ("sehr wenig") a big role for the film, but actual research on the Höß family did:

https://www.cargo-film.de/film/spielfil ... -interest/

Research obviously from Höß own autobiographical notes, but also actual (pre-) court interviews. From the Frankfurter Auschwitz Prozess for example, Hedwig Höß:

https://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/zeugen ... ss-Hedwig/

Again german only, but not just for this, a phenomenal web site including many many of the Process hearings et cetera. From the Fritz Bauer Institut.

[Dark Matters]

I am mystified by several things about this film… please jump on answer some of them if you want. First of all the casting of the main actor… the husband…. This on my opinion was poor casting… yes he had no sense of humour and was bland and boring….which was right …. But I could not believe he was the commandant of the camp,… he was weak and lifeless …. He had no feeling of authority or leadership …. Plus what was with that ridiculous hair style…. He looked like someone out of this year not 1943 …. What was the thinking behind this? This casting and hairstyle got in the way of appreciating the film…. Plus what was the point of the negative technique showing the woman placing apples on the wall then going back and fetching them ? A bit of Glazier over the top film technique for no real reason. But it was a haunting film and brilliantly put together with the horrific soundtrack and keeping the obvious at arms length.

[Dark Matters]

Cleaning the now a museum was odd and added nothing…. Like a few other scenes… like the arty negative scene of a woman planting apples the going back to pick them up… it was as of the editor had discovered a new technique and Glazier found a way to squeeze it into the film to appease him/her/they

[Mr Sausage]

Plus what was with that ridiculous hair style…. He looked like someone out of this year not 1943 …. What was the thinking behind this?

This was a popular hair style among nazis at the time. In fact, it was the exact hairstyle sported by the real commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss.

As to why the Höss stand-in is portrayed as a schlubby middle-management type...that's the whole point, the everyday banality of him and the other nazis.

The rest of the thread is full of attempts to answer some of the rest of your questions.

[Tuco]

RE: Haircuts
I've been calling the hairdos worn by many 20-somethings "Nazi Haircuts" for at least the past 10 years. Of course, now that fascism is apparently coming back into style, I shouldn't be surprised.

I walked out of the film in somewhat of a daze. The horror was there, though mostly implicit, and the contrast with the middle-class lifestyle of the family was, I think, very-well rendered. The modern segment didn't work for me, but all things considered, I found it to be a very good film, perhaps not as moving as "Son of Saul", but certainly more honest than Spielberg's film. Not that "Schindler's List" isn't moving, but Spielberg is the King of Schmaltz (and I hate when I fall for it).

When all is said and done, I find myself thinking about "The Zone of Interest" often...

[Matt]

I had great hopes for it in depicting the terrible moral choices people in the camps often had to make just to survive (or help others to survive), but Son of Saul is, for me, a vile film. There are many Holocaust films that are pure kitsch and reprehensible simply for matters of taste, but this one especially uses an aggressive form of “international arthouse style” to cynically push a load of exploitative thriller tropes and audience-punishing emotional manipulation. For me, it exists on the same moral plane as something like Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7.

There’s also the issue of the filmmakers exploiting people, many of them homeless, working as background (literally lying around as naked corpses for entire days for which they were paid a dollar). The lead actor’s attempt to spin it as a positive is almost comically grotesque:

For his part, Röhrig claims the homeless extras’ experience was a positive one. “So it was extremely moving to me and others, so still today, I had messages from some of these homeless, old ladies, ‘Géza, congratulations, I can’t wait to see the movie.’ And they are on the computer of the homeless shelter, and waiting in line, and they go on the Facebook, the page of the movie, so when I say it’s a team effort, I really mean it,” he says.

It’s not a surprise to me that the director of this film is a vocal critic of Glazer’s Oscars speech.

I admit I’m a tough critic when it comes to fictionalized or dramatized films about the camps. I mostly agree with the sentiment that the actualities of the subject cannot and should not be addressed through entertainment (or through fictionalized, conspicuous “anti-entertainment” like Son of Saul). Zone of Interest takes an oblique approach by depicting everything that goes on outside the camps that makes what happens inside the camps possible. Some of the criticisms here that the actors should have been more attractive or more charismatic are just beyond my comprehension. They seem to express a desire for the Nazis to be either more alienating (we can’t identify with them because they are so much prettier than us) or more monstrous (we can’t identify with them because they are so obviously evil), when the entire point of the film is that they are exactly the same mundane, average, boring, workaday drones as we are. We are all equally as capable of making the small daily decisions that lead to or enable genocide.

This may be pedantic and condescending to say, but the much-cited “banality of evil” in Hannah Arendt’s coinage does not refer to, as many (not necessarily here) seem to be misinterpreting it, evil being banal (which, quite rightly, would be an objectionable concept), but of evil being made possible and achievable by banality—little daily decisions (even the decision simply to follow orders or to uphold the status quo) as individual grains of sand that eventually add up to a crushing weight. Höss was not a success because he was a charismatic leader, he was a success because he was a capable manager.

Zone takes great pains not to exploit the suffering of those in the camps and instead strives to pay small, quiet tributes to them in the use of the true story of the girl placing the apples outside the camp and her finding and playing the music written by a prisoner. I’m not sure it’s all successful or that it’s a towering, flawless film, but it’s making an effort not to trivialize or sentimentalize.

[Tuco]

Interesting response, Matt. Will re-examine "Saul" (was not aware of the exploitation of the homeless), and I would be the first to admit that I tend to respond to films emotionally before aesthetically (though my brain sometimes rushes to "catch up"!) "Vile" is rather strong to describe the film, but to each his own. At any rate, I think we'll both agree that "Zone" has certainly inspired a rather spirited and welcome debate here on The Forum.