The Zone of Interest (2023), dir. Jonathan Glazer

As in the Martin Amis novel from 2014, adapted. Due for US release mid-December.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vfg3KkV54

(I just saw Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall the other day so this looks like one hell of a one-two.)

Hmm, I know Alfred saw it, wasn't totally positive, and maybe I missed discussion elsewhere. Just saw it myself -- I appreciated the coldness and the pettiness.

Yeah, rather on-the-nose despite unsettling moments

The sound design of this film should win every award for such things. Most amazing aspect of the film, although Hüller is also great. As my wife put it, she moves around "like she hasn't taken a shit in 15 years."

Beyond the very obvious similarities with the occupation/destruction of Gaza this film evokes, it unsettles down to a microlevel. Hüller modeling a Jewish woman's fur coat that she's received is obviously grotesque, but most of us reading this also do a lot of compartmentalizing about the source of some of the clothes and goods we purchase.

Saw this on Saturday, one of those films I can appreciate more than enjoy, Glazer certainly achieved what he set out to do in evoking the banality of evil, and reading up on Höss and his family it seems to have been very accurate. The sound design was astounding, yes, that long black screen at the start and the sounds over the end credits, also the photography was excellent throughout. But I'm still not sure I really took anything new away from it. I was talking to my wife about it yesterday and she wondered why there's another film about Auschwitz when so many other human-made horrors are left undiscussed, both historically and in the present day, I think it does bring home the message more clearly if it's discussing an event absolutely everyone can agree is 100% evil, but otoh with the holocaust there's also a danger that it can be filed away as unique to a country and a time, and no greater lesson learned. One thing I felt was that the family seemed very much like an English family of the time, so maybe being a little too critical here, and I'm not sure if I want to batter people with "YOU are capable of this too!" - but it would be a bit more interesting and maybe that's what we need.

Well, I did learn that Nazis were evil people who had families.

xp I agree with a lot of that, however one thing I think the ending shows

with the women cleaning the Auschwitz museum, is that even the realized hope that history will judge monsters accurately can be cold comfort indeed.

The film is such a (deliberate) closed circle that it didn't leave me with much to think about.

I read about his daughter yesterday, her story raises a lot of questions and would have been a good (if unoriginal) framing device

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/heaven-in-auschwitz-living-as-a-killer-s-daughter-8803930.html

I felt similarly ambivalent. I appreciated some aesthetic choices more after I read about them (e.g., not to use conventional film lighting), but there's not much of a film beyond the conceptual premise. (Although that, too, is by design, I suppose?) The one line that sticks with me is the horrific observation Hoss makes to Hedy over the phone at the end.

I liked it a lot. It seems to me like the first film to treat Holocaust as a Historical Event, instead of as lived experience. Or the first film about Holocaust made after the survivors have gotten too old to be the link to the past. As such, it's a bit fumbling and unsure of itself, but also very different.

I don't really think it's about the 'banality of evil', though. The Höss family are just plain evil. I think itt's very obvious with the reaction of the mother how much they've chosen a life as mass murderers.

Yes, it's surely a film about the monumental psychic effort - the endless laundry, literal and metaphorical - it takes to try to ignore the noise, smell, touch and taste of industrialised murder. I think the dreamlike, fairytale nightvision scenes justified the film by themselves.

I was wondering how much of this story is based upon true accounts of their life. I found the reaction of Hedy's mother to be one of the more fascinating aspects, and wondered if that was in line with anything that occurred in real life.

There's this robotic uncanny valley aspect, completely inhumane people pretending to be human and going through the motions of a normal family life.

Yes, it's surely a film about the monumental psychic effort - the endless laundry, literal and metaphorical - it takes to try to ignore the noise, smell, touch and taste of industrialised murder.

― Piedie Gimbel, 22. januar 2024 16:45 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I loved the scene where after he has sex with the girl he has to go to his own secret room in the basement to wash off. Doing wrong is a pain in the ass, takes so much work to hide it. Whether it's something banal like cheating on your wife, or something enormous like murdering 2,5 million people (according to Höss, the rest died of hunger and starvation, so technically he didn't murder them)

lol I did not realize Jonathan Glazer did that

I just want one Zone Of Interest trailer to say “from the director of Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity…”

— Matthew Schmid (@Holy_Schmid) January 12, 2024

From one of history's greatest monsters to...

and I'm not sure if I want to batter people with "YOU are capable of this too!" - but it would be a bit more interesting and maybe that's what we need

This film hit me like a brick just earlier, been wandering around in a daze. I'd argue it absolutely does this - or at least, it attacks purblind affluent complacency of all stripes. Huller's creation is almost transcendentally evil. I like that the kids don't get away with it either

I have to be careful not to come across as glib or worse here. The flash-forward near the end was good, the music over the end credits was spooky, and the part where we heard off-screen brutality was effective. But if the message is that Nazis had families, could be soft-spoken, and read to their children at bedtime, I already knew that. I just didn't connect with this as a film. I don't know how it measures up to the novel.

My understanding is that it is a *very* loose adaptation

I'm with clem. It's a film that demands pre-determined reactions.

question: were the night vision sequences meant to be dreams (höss keeps finding one of his daughters sleepwalking, talking about giving people sugar, etc) or real (one of the sons overhears someone being put to death because of a fight over an apple, presumably left by the daughter) or meant to be ambiguous

I think they're meant to be real, although I will freely admit that I did not even understand what was happening in them until I read about the movie afterwards.

Keith Harris on Zone of Interest

https://racketmn.com/the-zone-of-interest-and-origin-are-good-faith-failures

I've seen it twice now, the first time I've done that for a new release film since Nope (honorable mention to Godzilla Minus One given the b/w version that's running this week) and for the same reason -- I wanted to hear the sound design again in a theatrical setting. That may sound like a terrible reason to see a film like this again in that setting and yet it is clearly what is meant to succeed about the film to start with.

My review from last month’s uncut fwiw

THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam
Opens 2 February
Cert 12a
8/10

It’s the early 1940s and a family’s idyll is briefly imperiled: the father is promoted to a better paying job in another city and for a moment it seems like the family will be uprooted. Everyone is distraught and no one wants to leave. Fortunately better sense prevails, disaster is averted and they stay put in their blessed plot. You might recognise the story from Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland’s Meet Me in St Louis, nominally set in 1903, but filmed in 1944, and a devoutly wished fantasy of hearth and home confected for a nation sundered by war.

It’s also the plot of Jonathan Glazer’s new film about Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, and their cultivation of a charming house and garden next door to Auschwitz, the concentration camp where Rudolf is commander. The zone of interest - Das Interessengebiet - was the Nazis’ term for the restricted area around the camp, a site of much capitalist speculation - but for Glazer it’s also the incomprehensible abyss between the bucolic garden and the gas chamber.

If Glazer’s last film, the starkly stunning Under The Skin, was about the dawning of empathy and fellow feeling, The Zone of Interest is about its steadfast refusal, the concerted attempt to block out reality, even as the stench and squalor of extermination is overwhelming. The film is shot as if by disinterested surveillance cameras, neutrally documenting the family Höss as they potter about cultivating their radishes, frolicking on the banks of the river Sola, endlessly laundering their crisp white bed linen from the infernal soot of the death factory.

Under the Skin was a visionary film, but also an audio miracle, embodied in the warp and woof of Mica Levi’s score. Here the sound design - Levi again, with sound designers Johnnie Burn and Tarm Willers - is the soul of the film. The screams, screech and scrape of Auschwitz seep insidiously into the domestic interiors like spores or smoke, poisoning the picnics and soirees.

Horror is present most profoundly in their dreams. Glazer is as cavalier in his adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel - he takes not much more than the setting and the primary sources - as he was with Michel Faber in his earlier film. But the austere cinematography slips loose of the quotidian in scenes, shot with thermal imaging cameras, following a young girl cycling out of a Grimm fairytale and into the camp at night to secrete food for the starving prisoners. In the luminous inverted nocturne her strange fruit glows like Yeats’s silver apples of the moon, somehow recalling Romanian poet and prison camp survivor Paul Celan’s 1945 death camp threnody ‘Todesfugue’, with its uncanny imagery of the “black milk of daybreak”. It’s a singular, unforgettable image from modern cinema’s most lucid poet of the abyss.

xp Even though I was lukewarm on it, I actually find myself wanting to rewatch it as well, now that I have a better understanding of what the movie is up to.

FWIW (though obviously how it is shot is meant to suggest dream/fairy tale experiences at work) the girl distributing the apples is drawn from the experience of a Polish resident who the team interviewed and worked with -- supposedly both her dress and bike her character uses were her own -- and she's one of the three names thanked/memorialized in the end credits as having passed, along with Amis and one other. More on that in this long Glazer interview

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview

found this pretty devastating. the extended black screen intro with the striking score narrows our focus on the sound, the sound of the train engine prefaces the family picking through their victims clothes. the "noise" that soundtracks their daily lives is familiar to us, not its literal sound but its feeling. the cut to the museum obviously brings us back to the present, but so does the sequence of flowers settling on a red bloom that fades to a red screen until we're very aware of the fact that we're sitting in a theater bathed in red light. the horror is so massive as to be incomprehisible, but we can feel the texture of it. by depicting through abscence it avoids the othering and the moralizing that would make it easy to set it aside and it manages to be more than a lesson

Hmm. We saw this tonight, were unpersuaded. We’re big Glazer fans in this house but this didn’t really go anywhere. All of its insights are in the first 5 minutes and then it’s just saying the same thing over and over.

Very well made of course. The things that linger are some of the shots and images. My wife said, “Too much plot,” and I agree. A more impressionistic take would have had the opportunity to convey more imo.

I thought this was more widely known, but when I saw Hüller give a talk on this (and Anatomy of a Fall) at the NYFF last fall, she went into detail about how they shot inside the home of Zone of Interest which sounded marvelous: basically acting or really just being in a real space without anything that was a camera, a microphone or someone who wasn't a character (i.e. a crew member or even a director) to remind one that this was a movie production. Cameras and microphones were hidden and pretty much running all the time so that there wasn't any sense of acting to a camera position or relaxing when you knew you were off-camera. It was interesting and yet at the same time bewildering because it doesn't really feel like it had a profound impact cinematically-speaking. I was kind of wondering if anyone would feel the same way, and it looks like Richard Brody might - he already reviewed the film but he only learned about this aspect of the production today.

This is fascinating, doubly so because the technique is undetectable in the movie. https://t.co/sfR8LEWJs1

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) February 3, 2024

One wonders if Glazer merely put the actors in a position of acting as if they were on stage in a play which doesn't really translate to screen if you're not doing anything like the one-take pageant Russian Ark or the long unbroken takes of Talking to Strangers.

Should add, the crew and director were in the basement where they had monitors set up, so they were there, but out of sight.

Some movies don’t lend themselves to the YouTube movie reviewer template pic.twitter.com/JApvYYzR8d

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) February 3, 2024

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c5_BisFDBNs/maxresdefault.jpg

karl’s excellent post comes closest to conveying how i felt about this. i thought there was a lot more to consider than “damn they do be living in comfort while smokestacks next door exhale the smoke of human flesh.” and i think it’s really the nighttime scenes everyone is talk about, like the film trying to crawl out of its monolithic tone, its photonegative where someone is trying to plant fruit in the ash, in contrast with the main cast whose domestic and professional lives are entirely designed around creating more ash. a really beautiful effect that might look “ugly” or “wrong” at first, just as the daytime scenes in the movie are gorgeous but contain no beauty

I don't think I've seen many people comment on the incredibly crisp, precise visual focus of the film yet. As soon as that first river-side image hit the screen I was almost shocked at how intense it was.

I thought whatever lighting filter he used was very effective. Yeah, those very-Glazer touches were the best parts. Likewise the score. I could have done with a lot more of that. And, I don't know, picked a different family. Rudolf Hess and his wife being evil, banal or otherwise, is just too well-duh.

Likewise the score. I could have done with a lot more of that.

Glazer and Levi apparently had much more of a score for the film prepped but then felt it was better to strip a lot of it back or out entirely. I'm on board with that.

i liked this a lot. lemme just also say that i don't exactly begrudge anyone who found it boring as it's intentionally trying to provoke that reaction to some degree, so i can't really fault anyone who falls on the other side of the line

that being said, i don't actually agree w/ the idea that we're beyond the banality of evil as far as the holocaust goes. in reality, i think back on how i was taught the holocaust in schools and synagogues, and it wasn't about banality at all -- it was about grotesquely emaciated bodies, piles of corpses, a singularly evil and destructive dictator etc. we were sat down to grimly watch stuff like "the pianist." i was completely taken aback watching 'shoah' a few years ago when confronted by the actual, true banality of that film ... the degree to which the towns that housed concentration camps were -- and that point, still were -- just normal communities except for the one thing happening over there. seeing a random old polish woman explain how you had to take your donkey down that road every day like normal, but also had to hear the sounds of mass extermination, rattled me in a real way. i don't think that 'the zone of interest' is as powerful as that film, largely for obvious reasons, but i do bristle against the idea that "banality of evil" is a shallow well to be drawing from, even/especially as it relates to nazis.

so in that vein, i loved the way the hoss couple are framed as viewing essentially the entire proceedings thru the lens of upward mobility and careerism. part of what makes rudolf's final call home so shocking is that it's the only time in the film where you really hear any passion about his job (murder of jews), and even then it's a tossed off aside to the bigger news of a strategic offensive potentially bearing the family name. the scene where hedwig is taking her mother around the garden, basking in the shower of compliments, and her mother says something like "well, you've really made something of yourself" really stuck w/ me. i found that sort of grounding -- these people were literally having the same conversations as you, mapping their lives along the exact same contours -- to be particularly effective even if i can sit here and say that intuitively i understand that there were mothers who were proud of their children for advancing in the nazi party, and that those children had interior home lives of their own.

i also think setting a tone of "banality" allowed glazer to give real, genuine weight to small bits of the film that otherwise seem to come and go. for instance, the way in which the film raises the concept of how jews tried to save their possessions (the diamond in the toothpaste) made it even more hard to swallow for me. we don't see that discovery take place, the film doesn't even linger on it for a second -- but when you take a step back and think about the jew who really thought he or she was going to be able to smuggle their possessions past the nazis, or even the basic idea that a future existed at auschwitz that lasted longer than 20 minutes, the absolute heartbreaking naivety at the center of that idea... a lesser film would have made a mountain of that moment and been worse off for it, imo. it -- the theft of material goods -- is at once a minor part of the holocaust but also as devastating and disrespectful as mass death in its own way, and i think the film really deftly hits that point, not just w/ the diamond thing but even the way in which hedwig has this whole silent, twisted relationship w/ the half-used lipstick she gets to possess. you see the titillation mixing with the disgust, you see her wrestling w/ her own vanity & ideas of female respectability... there is a lot being said about society and ego in that scene... and then she just chucks the lipstick in her make up drawer and moves on with her day, as does the film itself. the object carries so much meaning but is also meaningless. i think a lesser film is not able to balance the nuance here.

the film is a feast for the eyes as you would absolutely expect from glazer, but i also felt like there was real meaning to the artiness and the opulence this time around, in a similar way to how scorcese venerates and celebrates the opulence of the osage in 'killers of the flower moon.' the bright patterns of the hoss family's wallpaper, the close-up lingering shots of blooming plants ... the meticulousness of glazer's shots & his continual insertion of color, to me, express his love of film but also his empathy for people who had their lives and possessions stolen from them. the beauty that seeps thru the cracks of this film are vestiges of the film's unseen dead, sometimes literally but more often than not metaphorically.

one thing that also felt key to me is that we never see the hoss couple experiencing much if any joy -- even in times of familial happiness we are party to the internal turmoil that is roiling their marriage. when rudolf escapes to the river for peace, his wife hunts him down and they stew silently. when rudolf fucks some random girl all we see is the grim walk down dank hallways to wash dick off. their final conversation in the film ends w/ hedwig essentially saying "your life is a nuisance to me." even when we see them laughing over some old story in bed, we're left w/ the sense that there is something off, that they don't even really share the same sense of humor. they are at once evil but also pitiful... there is never a time where either of them exhales... the film doesn't let them off the hook in this way.

lastly i thought the flip to the auschwitz musuem was really audacious -- suddenly being tossed into a world largely free of the aesthetic concerns of auteur filmmaking felt like plunging into a freezing cold lake, but the more the camera lingered on the mundane work of keeping up the museum the more i felt the burden of history, the unbreakable tethering to the past. just as there was routine work needed to keep auschwitz operational in the 1940s, the same is needed now -- for different purposes, of course, but man the film left me feeling like that was the coldest of comforts.

lastly i thought the flip to the auschwitz musuem was really audacious

First viewing through I was almost brought up short by that cut to what seemed like a distant tunnel opening. It was a quiet bit of weird silent horror.

Some good posts. It's been too many years for me to recall Birth with any clarity, and now that Criterion Channel's got a Glazerthon I'll re-watch it. I do remember Under the Skin well enough; it struck me at the time as high-toned schlock but I may need to give it another shot too. Maybe Glazer and I aren't simpatico.

Anyone watched his new short on the Criterion Channel?

I don't really disagree with anything in yr post, Jordan. I think it did all of that, with some originality and intentionality that was suited to the subject matter — I thought the movie was a fair effort, it doesn't trivialize anything, it understands and respects the gravity of its material. I just really didn't feel like it had anything new to say? Again, I think the narrative choice to focus on Rudolf Hess — however lightly fictionalized — just boxes it in. Much more interesting and damning to me would have been similar depictions of other lives, lives a little more removed from actually running the machinery of the Holocaust. I guess what I mean is, of course the Hesses were villains. Rudolf Hess was such a villain that he was convicted at Nuremberg and promptly hanged. But what about people who just lived nearby and worked in shops or factories, who noticed ashes falling on their clothes on the clotheslines or whatever. In a way, I don't think the movie does enough to indict the complicity of the entire society, because it's focused on the obviously evil leadership.

But what about people who just lived nearby and worked in shops or factories, who noticed ashes falling on their clothes on the clotheslines or whatever.

Although set in the years before WWI, Haneke's The White Ribbon iirc explores collective culpability.

And I still haven't seen that, becz Haneke mostly annoys me, but maybe I should.

I didn't care for it but give it a shot.

it struck me at the time as high-toned schlock

not sure i get this alfred, nothing about under the skin reads as schlocky to me other than it’s genre fiction or whatever. i think it’s one of the more harrowing and heartbreaking studies of otherness ever made, of longing to be normal but knowing you’ve been made wrong, that your very existence destabilizes and annihilates the “normal” (i’m projecting but it is also very very trans imo). it’s funny, both it and zone of interest are movies about alienation, but zone is observing it through the other end of the telescope, i.e. these are people who have alienated themselves from any human impulse, on purpose, because they want it that way. it will be much harder for me to revisit as a result but in the end it may be the more difficult and impressive work

incidentally under the skin was another instance of glazer gutting the source material to the bare minimum and renovating whatever’s left to his own designs, which is something i generally approve of in adaptations (especially in the zone of interest’s case, not an amis fan)

Yeah, I'm with Ivy, I thought "Under the Skin" pretty profound in an original way.

I thought this one was really spooky and disquieting, like a documentary about a haunted house where the ghosts all silently know they have cancer. And yeah, the use of sound and music was incredible. Any good interviews or features on that worth linking?

I remember hearing that some of the people in under the skin were just random people they loosed scarjo on, so there is a kind of subliminal borat vibe to it that could read as schlocky.

Funny how Berlin school aesthetics have graduated to Oscar bait now. Felt like hoss-era Petzold. Challenging enough in the context of the big release awards films but a weird pastiche. I didn't even learn anything new about the Nazis!

Sandra huller was fun, limping around as an evil haus frau

Thinking about what Tipsy says above about the movie not focusing on the collective complicity of an entire society and I can’t help but note that the movie was made with the full cooperation of the Polish government of the time, which was very right wing and notoriously the official line was to absolve the Polish people from any complicity with the Holocaust.

Anyway saw this last night and found it disturbing but fascinating and adding dittos to the sound design and what was left of Mica Levi’s score. I liked the occasional artsy “ruptures” in the otherwise straightforward style like the dissolve to red midway through the film, and found the ending quite effective. Does Höss have a moment of unease?

(BTW Wikipedia sez Höss was tried by the Polish People’s Republic, not Nuremberg)

You are correct. Hess was at Nuremburg, Hoss was tried in Poland. Got my Rudolfs crossed. But Hoss was hanged at Auschwitz either way.

Saw this for a second time today. I pretended it was the first time so I could go to the movies with someone I wanted to go to the movies with. Which isn't exactly making out during Schindler's List, but I suppose that's the first step along that path.

Liked it a bit more the second time. I wouldn't withdraw my original complaint, that it's too-familiar terrain, but maybe that's a little unfair--most art is, and just judged on its own terms, it's very well made. It I were reviewing the film, one line could serve as a good title: "Heil Hitler. Et cetera." The music, during the weird B&W sequences, and again over the end credits--not the same, and in the B&W sequences it's more like electronic noise--is really spooky.

Thought that the bookends of music from Mica Levi were absolutely stunningly perfect: the opening lull that gently begins to decay and sink into lower keys as if to prepare the audience to fall into a willing hypnosis, and then at the end those rudimentary ghost scales rising rising rising, not without hysteria, acting like the hypnotist’s clap, sending the subject/audience back out into the world that is entirely still the same, only now you are under a perception altering spell.

As I waited in the lobby today for my film to start, The Zone of Interest was finishing and that end-credit music was playing. Was immediately caught up in it once again--one of the year's highlights for me.

I just want one Zone Of Interest trailer to say “from the director of Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity…”

— Matthew Schmid (@Holy_Schmid) January 12, 2024

At the screening I went to they played the Jamiroquai video just before the film. I was wondering what that was all about. (Thx to jaymc for finding the tweet).

This movie has stuck with me more than most this year. The formal/experimental stuff helps a lot. At a dinner party Saturday night (with regular folks, not a bunch of film nerds or anything), it was the only of the best picture noms that anyone found worth discussing or talking about. Admittedly, a low bar.

I'm a little surprised at how much it seems to resonate with some folks I know, because I got basically zero emotional resonance from the movie at all. It all felt like a formal exercise and an obvious one at that. (A very well made formal exercise, for sure.) But ymmv etc.

Actually, I did feel the mom's unease about being there. That outside perspective coming into this world of normalized horror and not being able to normalize it for herself. It hinted at more interesting directions the movie could have gone.

Formal exercises are, admittedly, more likely to get an emotional response from me

Yes, Hedy's mother being unconflicted and fine with genocide as a concept happening somewhere else, but then unable to process it when it's happening right next door, is one of the film's brutal points, made clinically instead of with a sledgehammer

Yeah, exactly.

Tbf, I think the formal stuff is ultimately the biggest reason to see this, so I agree with the ymmv take. Almost everything noteworthy about the film has little to do with the characters or story (as such) or acting, it's all about the setting and sound design and behind the scenes approach and formal interruptions (the score, the more or less static monochrome stills, the night-cam stuff, the jarring shift from fictionalized to present-day documentary). Nonetheless, I remain impressed Glazer was able to inject enough stuff to escape being ("just") another Holocaust film.

I wouldn't be surprised if the December Vanity Fair making-of piece was posted upthread, but just in case:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/zone-of-interest-jonathan-glazer-shot-list-awards-insider

Back in December, Jim Hoberman placed this at the top of his ballot when he took part in year-end critics polls. (FWIW, in one case, he added he couldn't get behind any of the year's "big" films.)

He wrote a review in The Nation published on December 4th, and after reading many of the polarized reactions to Glazer's remarks, it brought to mind how differently people might process the film and what to take away from it. Here's an excerpt from Hoberman's review:

"To a degree, Glazer’s strategy of indirection was anticipated some 45 years ago by Theodor Kotulla’s little-known Death Is My Trade, a two-and-a-half-hour West German telefilm that recounted Höss’s progress from disoriented World War I veteran to the man who built Auschwitz. A critic turned filmmaker, Kotulla much admired Robert Bresson, and one can find Bresson’s influence in the film’s non-emotive acting and ascetic staging. The understatement of its German title, which can be translated as Scenes From a German Life, suits the provocatively neutral, distanced style.

"I saw Death Is My Trade years ago and remember being angered by Kotulla’s seeming refusal to acknowledge Höss’s victims until the final scenes, when the camera tours present-day Auschwitz. I did not get Kotulla’s decision to forestall his German audience from regarding Höss’s ordinary “German life” through eyes misty with crocodile tears. The Zone of Interest changed my mind about Kotulla’s approach. With no alternate figures of identification besides Rudi and Hedy, the movie offers a test for its audience, posing all manner of questions, including some about the viewers themselves and the film as well.

"Can indirection convey the full horror of the subject? Are the soldiers who direct drones thousands of miles away also desk murderers? At what point does garden-variety selfishness become truly evil? Is the concept of lebensraum specifically German? It is impossible to listen to the Hösses speak of the 'settler' dreams that Hitler promised them without thinking of the role of settlers in American history, colonial Africa, or the occupied West Bank. To what degree do we also live comfortably in and profit from a state of historical denial?"

finally got around to reading a plot synopsis of the novel (which I had never read); wow, this is more than a 'loose adaptation', they only share a title and setting.

Man, I dunno. Every positive review I read of it just makes me scratch my head because it all seems SO OBVIOUS. I keep waiting for someone to come up with a take that makes me go, "Oh, I hadn't thought about that," but instead it's just, "This movie really made think that getting hit over the head with a sledgehammer actually hurts."

(And I get that a fair amount of the reaction is just to Glazer's interesting filmmaking, and I agree that he's an interesting filmmaker. But we already knew that, too.)

did you watch it yet?

Indeed. I felt like I was getting hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

Must be a frustrating experience going to the movies and always demanding that they make you think about something in a new way.

As frustrating as going to the cinema and demanding more than cool sound design.

(And I get that a fair amount of the reaction is just to Glazer's interesting filmmaking, and I agree that he's an interesting filmmaker. But we already knew that, too.)

Personally I see interesting filmmaking as an aesthetic pleasure in and of itself and not a fact to be learned?

OTM. And sometimes it’s a pleasure to be bludgeoned by art.

An interesting director doesn't always produce interesting films: I thought this was clear? I watched Birth last week for the first time and it impressed me.

I didn't dislike TZOI, especially after my seconds viewing; it's just neither here nor there. Nor did I find it bludgeoning.

Bludgeoning is maybe overstating, although the flash-forward at the end was for sure more sledgehammer than scalpel. But yeah, I felt like the entire thesis statement of the movie was in the first five or 10 minutes, and then it didn’t add anything past that. It was all right there.

Not to fence-sit, but I'm on both sides of this in this thread: identical reaction to Tipsy initially, but after a second viewing often thinking about the great final few minutes, especially the music. I think "I already know this" is a fair and common complaint with movies or any art. There's another movie--I don't really want to name it, but I'm the last person in the world who doesn't hate it--where one of the many ways it's dismissed is "Does this guy actually think he came up with the idea that there's no end to the rottenness and evil that lurk beneath the surface of suburban life?" My counter is always no, he doesn't, but the accusation itself seems reasonable to me.

And his interestingness as a filmmaker is what will keep me watching his movies. But it doesn’t necessarily mean I will love them, or not prefer some to others.

xp j0rdan's long excellent post upthread about banality of evil

whether or not banality of evil wrt the holocaust is tired as a concept, one thing i've learned since watching this movie is that it is pretty badly misplaced as a description of the historical rudolf hoss. hoss joined the nazi party in 1922 (a decade before eichmann) when he was 21 years old and was a particularly violent and murderous member of the freikorps. he isn't just a bureaucrat who stumbled ass-backwards up the hierarchy into a position of power, but a fanatically passionate idealist and innovator who used his ingenuity and worked hard to push through engineering problems that expanded the frontier of possibility in genocide. glazer's decision to omit this detail is his creative license, but it's an odd choice. i'm not sure what the intention was in showing hoss retching on the stairs, but it suggests a level of grief that--aside from a couple passages in his memoir and a letter to prosecution written four days before his hanging--there's no evidence of at all. hoss was described as apathetic by psychologists who interviewed him at nuremberg, and many of the excuses and apologies in sections of his memoir are contradicted later on in the text. the movie felt so ideologically wedded to the *concept* of the banality of evil that it felt incurious about the lives of its actual subjects

i didn't actively hate the movie but like tipsy and jaymc i felt basically nothing. it's not so much that "not enough happens"--it's that not enough happens conditional on what does happen. a more restrained slow cinema approach that just showed the family's domestic routine--without hinting at a plot that never materialized with the narrative about hoss being transferred to orianenburg--may have been more effective

my favourite part was the opening--i'm a sucker for music playing to a dark screen on a theatre sound system. but i actually disliked the closing piece (though it didn't help that the theatre i saw it at slammed the lights on the second the credits rolled)

I had a conversation with a friend who liked the movie a lot more than I do, and she said it reminded her of those photos that came out some years ago of Auschwitz employees picking blueberries and posing for group workplace pictures and laughing etc. It reminded me of those photos too, but to me the movie suffered hugely by comparison. First, I'd already seen those photos and had whatever revelations are to be gotten from them, and didn't feel like the film added any new revelations on top of them. And second, I thought those were more affecting because they were of the rank and file people who worked at the camp, who obviously knew everything going on there but they were mostly probably showing up every day for the paycheck. I would have much preferred a movie about them than the camp commander and his family. Or even not about them, but about their neighbors or family members.

If you really want to talk about broad moral complicity and the ways people out of self-interest can easily excuse or defend or just ignore evil in their midst, then I think that conversation is more interesting and revealing if it's looking at permeating the entire culture and society. By focusing mostly on people who were not just complicit but significant and deliberate actors in the horrors, I think Glazer just set himself up badly for the case he seems to be wanting to make. "Auschwitz commander was a bad person who deliberately did terrible things, and his wife went along with it too" is just not a revelation no matter how creatively it's presented.

(There was a play produced a few years ago based on those photos, I wonder if maybe Glazer should have started with that as his source material rather than the Amis novel that he mostly didn't rely on anyway)

I think the way the film is made by default kind of ... not downplays but sort of obscures the extent of his evil. It's not until the end, the phone call, that he ever actively talks about gassing people, right? I can't remember. I do agree the movie is obvious and more about the approach than the subject, but it instilled in me a queasiness I don't usually get from these sorts of things. I also appreciate that it was under two hours and landed a PG-13 rating, achievable only because the literal R-rated horrors were not displayed despite the more subtle hints of horror being in a way more, well, horrifying. The creeping dread of ashes in the river ...

i'm not sure what the intention was in showing hoss retching on the stairs

I don't think it was grief, I think it was a temporal alignment of what he was doing and the present. Where briefly his body, if not the man himself, was being punished for his infractions, like a fleeting vengeful manifestation of the future cancer he's been feeding.

I found the film to be personally interesting as a comparison, this family in a home blocking out the outside world, going about their lives and gardening or w/e hiding in a way, a comparison to my wife's dad's life spent largely secluded in a home with a high wall, gardening away, probably blocking out his own memories of the Holocaust, himself having only not gone to Auschwitz by fortune of an Italian diplomat who pulled the family out of a holding camp 48 hours shy of boarding the train.

I don't think him retching was anything more than a symbolic almost biological reaction to the inhumanity, almost separate from his own philosophical stance, or like maybe the final ounce of humanity vacating him or something I don't know.

I do think the reality of such inhumane individuals is a bit less poetic, I think of the TV show Narcos and how it made Pablo Escobar via the performance almost a soulful, conflicted guy when the actuality is just a human who is a total void.

Not that tzoi was making Hoss soulfully conflicted. I do think it's fair to take a bit of artistic license with real life monsters in order to say something else but I can understand if people don't find such monsters worthy of the nuance of this type

I took the retching as a sign that, yes, people doing terrible things do "know" on some level and suffer for it even if it's mostly in invisible ways. The retching was it being made briefly visible, evading the internal defenses set up to block it out.

Which is I guess a good thing to believe but I'm not sure if it's true. Probably some people had troubled consciences, but also probably some did not. For one thing, a regime like that is going to end up self-selecting for the people most willing to do terrible things without wavering. (See also, Trump administration, Stephen Miller.)

I took the retching as a sign that, yes, people doing terrible things do "know" on some level and suffer for it even if it's mostly in invisible ways. The retching was it being made briefly visible, evading the internal defenses set up to block it out.

I really see it as a pretty simply metaphysical filmmaker intrusion. The retching happens, iirc, when he's leaving at the end of the night. He senses something in the darkness, investigates, and then he retches. (I think that is the order of things.) But this is also when the film suddenly breaks the fourth wall and pops into the contemporary real world, the cleaning lady squad, so I think it's Glazer depicting the weight of his actions, the end result of his evil, causing him discomfort, even if he has no idea what is happening and why. A message of wrath being visited on a man too callous to be anything but oblivious.

And then like that it passes, his gastrointestinal "vision" of the future fades, he regains his composure, and resumes his walk down the stairs as if nothing happened.

That's a pretty good take.

I think perhaps if the film has any "depth" it's less thematic than formal, right? There seems to be a lot to say about partitioning, compartmentalizing, how space is formed and patrolled, what seeps through (and what doesn't). There's an idea in second-order systems theory, for instance, that systems are both closed and open. Closed in terms of organization (what the system sees as information is internal to the system) and open in turns of structure (energy or matter flows across system boundaries, for instance).

I say all that to say that the movie seems like an investigation of such ideas, in particular how a work of art might be both open and closed, what it can and can't show (literally and figuratively). Anyway that's what I thought about while watching it. The ashes are fertilizer in the movie, but we know they are something else, where they come from, what their "history" is. We see both sides of a partition simultaneously while the movie itself can only indicate indirectly via the openness of its sound, or what exists in the margins of the image (what you're not supposed to be looking at).

One of the most horrifying things to me was imagining describing what we are not seeing to someone that has no idea. Like, just explaining the ashes as fertilizer, or floating down the river, saying it out loud to someone, is really the stuff of nightmares.

i took the retching the same as jic, good posts.

for me personally movies can get a lot of mileage out of beautiful moments undercut by a sickening feeling.

there's a difference between understanding "banality of evil" and truly feeling the extent to which our lives are a product of acts of violence made distant by time and/or space--for most of us the latter is impossible, certainly impossible to sustain, but exceptional experiences resensitize us to it. we're exposed to detached reports of mass violence on a daily basis if we want. i know i'm stating the obvious, but it is a weird state of affairs we live in! tzoi lets us look carefully at people who are very skilled at putting their conscience away and to consider them and the way their actions ripple through time. i think it's an accomplishment to present that to us without being didactic and moralizing, though i suppose some of you don't think it manages that. i think it does, and i think its formal strengths are why it's successful, why it gets across a feeling that is powerful to me, rather than just a familiar story. i watch movies in quite a dumb way much of the time, though, like people will talk to me about plot holes or even just plot beats and i'll have no idea what they're talking about, so i'm prob primed to enjoy movies that are operating on more of a sound-and-vision level.

typed that before reading ryan's great post, definitely describing something i felt watching it too but couldn't articulate

Just to add a thought: Part of the (admirable) ethical claim the movie might be making is that by making it's own "closed" nature so paradoxically visible, it may make us reflect on the very thing most movies try to elide by "hiding" their own framing, etc.

I hear all this and get it in the sense of, sure, that’s there. My own reaction comes down to what I felt while watching it, which was mostly frustration and disappointment. The reason I keep talking about the film it could have been is that I can see how the elements here could have added up to something powerful, but for me they just didn’t.

"Auschwitz commander was a bad person who deliberately did terrible things, and his wife went along with it too" is just not a revelation no matter how creatively it's presented.

I assure you I did.

And literally nothing I’ve read by its assorted champions makes me think otherwise. If your argument is “No it’s about what’s happening NOW don’t you see,” YES I do see. I would see that even without Glazer saying it in every interview and at the Oscars.

My point is that he picked the wrong frame for that story.

People acting like there are deep or esoteric insights here, and me, I just leave open the possibility that the guy who made Sexy Besst (which I love, don’t get me wrong) might not actually have novel things to say about the Holocaust.

Deepness an interesting idea here cf. Clement Greenberg’s comments on the “flatness” of modernist painting, where what’s happening is a refusal of depth. Glazer and crew do achieve something genuinely novel (imo) with regard not to the historical event of the holocaust (again I’d say the movie refuses any such “depth”) but how it’s represented in film. The “representation” of history of course being the same thing at issue in the contemporary coda.

I’ve read your posts, and that’s not coming across tbh. Standard for ilx film threads, we’ve always got a few people who insist on hyperfocusing on some obtuse point about something.

JiC, I also thought the same about the detail of the ashes, it haunted me.

There was this good Guardian piece with JG from December where he talks about the film a bit; notably “The commandant of Auschwitz was a bad person” doesn’t come up as a point he’s seeking to make at any one point. Sorry if it’s been posted but I’m not reading every single post itt.

I thought about his father’s reaction:

When his late father found out years ago that he was making a film about Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his reaction was anger mixed with dismay. “He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing this for,’” recalls Glazer, “‘Why are you digging it up? Let it rot.’ Those were the three words he used. His feeling was very much that it was gone, that it was in the past. I remember saying to him: ‘I really wish I could let it rot, but, no, Dad, it’s not in the past.’”

People acting like there are deep or esoteric insights here, and me, I just leave open the possibility that the guy who made Sexy Besst (which I love, don’t get me wrong) might not actually have novel things to say about the Holocaust.

_it struck me at the time as high-toned schlock_

not sure i get this alfred, nothing about _under the skin_ reads as schlocky to me other than it’s genre fiction or whatever. i think it’s one of the more harrowing and heartbreaking studies of otherness ever made, of longing to be normal but knowing you’ve been made wrong, that your very existence destabilizes and annihilates the “normal” (i’m projecting but it is also very very trans imo). it’s funny, both it and _zone of interest_ are movies about alienation, but _zone_ is observing it through the other end of the telescope, i.e. these are people who have alienated themselves from any human impulse, on purpose, because they want it that way. it will be much harder for me to revisit as a result but in the end it may be the more difficult and impressive work

incidentally _under the skin_ was another instance of glazer gutting the source material to the bare minimum and renovating whatever’s left to his own designs, which is something i generally approve of in adaptations (especially in _the zone of interest_’s case, not an amis fan)

i.e. these are people who have alienated themselves from any human impulse, on purpose, because they want it that way.

Excellent posts, Ryan, JIC, gyac.

One of the films this reminded me of is 10 Rillington Place, where again, domestic space is an expression of pathology - zones of interest, or terror. Part of the unease this film stirred in me is the sense that we're observing, surveying, the private moments of psychopaths. And of course that's a kind of reversal of the conditions of the concentration camp, where the prisoners were never not watched.

I’ve read your posts, and that’s not coming across tbh.

I guess I thought the meaning of the film was so obvious that it didn't need explication, but as far as I can tell there's broad agreement that it's about how people are capable of adjusting their moral and ethical frames so as to continue to live daily "normal" lives (of self-sustenance, career ambition, material acquisition etc) while being surrounded by and/or directly participating in great evils. And that there is always some kind of resistance to that, however perilous. And that this wasn't unique to Germans at a particular place and time but in fact most of/all of us do this in various ways every days.

My point is that there are lot less obvious and more effective ways to tell that story than by focusing on the commander of Auschwitz.

Yes, you’ve said that several times now.

domestic space is an expression of pathology

Great phrase.

xpost well what about that do YOU not understand?

If you're going to be condescending about "not understanding" a movie, please elaborate and elucidate.

i'm not sure that any piece of art should worry about what it's about

i'm not sure that Auschwitz is too cliched to be a useful study any more

You can scroll back up and read the many thoughtful posts people have made about this film, including people who’ve disliked it, rather than sitting here and repeating the same point for literal weeks.

I may have missed the post(s), but has anyone read the Amis novel, and, if so, is it any good? I leafed through it a couple weeks ago, and wow, yes, Glazer sure departed from the text.

xp lol ok

It's possible to "get" something and not be moved by it. I think that happens to all of us all the time. Also, "You just didn't get it" is like the least interesting thing any advocate for a piece of art can say.

i haven't read the Amis novel because it was written by Martin Amis

exactly

it's what initially put me off watching this, but I was glad I did

the sound design in this was exceptional, it made me think of how badly they got it wrong in another holocaust movie, Son Of Saul. Agree with the Rilington Place comparison.

the "ashes across the fields of Babice" line from Mrs Hoss felt like the closest it got to melodrama, but it effectively chilled me because it felt very real.

sometimes I just feel like people want movies to be about something else entirely which isn't a fair criticism of a film. the film is what it is. it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, IMO.

I agree with all of that.

Jamelle Bouie made a good point that the movie shows not how the Höss’ enjoyed their lives or thrived by repressing their consciences or ignoring whatever was going on next door, rather they knowingly enjoyed and thrived because of what Auschwitz was doing next door.

I've enjoyed a lot of the analysis here after finally seeing this last night. Aside from the cinema having an air conditioner running *louder than the film* in many places, I was physically moved by this film, and not in the mundane "felt sad" kind of way. I think this film is a singular masterpiece and unlike almost anything I've seen before. mothra despite disagreeing completely with your take, the idea that the film has nothing new to say is the mountain that Glazer struggled against - there is nothing new to say and all of our language and discourse about the Holocaust is collapsed and rendered into language and perceptions which are simply inadequate. The way out he devised is staggering in its conception: to make a film directly and entirely about the Holocaust, without affect of almost any kind. As an audience our existing knowledge and feeling about the subject rises in a clamour as the film progresses. We know what is unseen, we know what is happening, we know it was atrocity on an unimaginable scale, we become increasingly desperate for the film to offer a condemnation, a nod to our shared horror, a sign that we are all on the same side of the lens looking at this, but Glazer holds us in stasis, offers no resolution, or consequence, or punishment, or even unease for his characters, they simply continue their lives. One thing which really upset me was the camera placement, which borrows from Ozu the viewpoint of sitting in the room, looking at it. Glazer puts us there as mute observers, we are with these people and in the situation, and the film gives us no way to react, nothing to react against, no outlet, no release. And then Höss is transferred to the point of control, the scale amplifies, twenty people around a table likewise responsible for added monstrosities, a team preparing its resources for the next challenge, the next level, magnifying the horror - which is entirely internal to the viewer and thus inescapable - to an unbearable shriek that for me wiped out the party scene and most of the dialogue because I couldn't hear it. Then Höss on the stairs, his fierce control beginning to crack as his body or his soul begins to fail him, retching without explanation. And then that cut to the museum which just blows the doors off and gives space to grieve. As the door opened I had a whole body reaction and began to cry without even understanding why really. The door closes, Höss descends into darkness and Mica Levi expresses what can't be expressed in one of the most radical pieces of music I've ever heard in a cinema.

I'm with clem. It's a film that demands pre-determined reactions.

went in knowing nothing about it bar "Glazer", was blown back by the affect and effect of the formalism


It's not until the end, the phone call, that he ever actively talks about gassing people, right? I can't remember.

There's an extensive scene early on where they're assessing different designs for death chambers, and approve the efficiency of one pitchman's circular layout that allows different batches of internees to be killed and then burnt at once.

Glazer puts us there as mute observers, we are with these people and in the situation, and the film gives us no way to react, nothing to react against, no outlet, no release.

Good point. Ozu invites audience to share the intimacy; Glazer messes us up by insisting on the intimacy, foregrounding the audience and our complicity as invited guests.

That's a great take mattt, very thoughtful and I think persuasive as an argument for formal innovation. I love that about Glazer, and I think it has plenty of striking moments and sequences. I just ... I don't know what I was expecting, because I tried to not know much going in, but after about 20 minutes when I sort of felt where it was going or not going I just got kind of disengaged and disappointed. But obviously lots of people have other reactions, and I like your account of that.

xpost I meant an explicit acknowledgement from the main guy that he is killing people.

to make a film directly and entirely about the Holocaust, without affect of almost any kind.

imagining this as a Bresson film now, not hard to do

it's about a man who doesn't want to escape and is quite content where he is

the sound design in it makes me think about living next to the worst genocidal killing centre in human history is kind of like living next to a motorway - you get used to the noise.

yeah Glazer has used the phrase "ambient genocide" to describe both the world of the film and our current world.

I haven't seen this film, but admittedly would like to given all that I've read about it, as well as a recent re-read of some essays in the book Picturing Atrocity.

Some might find this essay interesting: https://medium.com/@samwarrenmiell/the-static-shot-in-the-zone-of-interest-f50571f35485

I guess it’s silly to comment on a movie I haven’t seen, but I found the concept kind of unremarkable and well worn when I heard about it and therefore lacked interest. Maybe it’s still worth watching as a particularly good expression of that concept (film is richer than just the message it delivers).

FWIW, I don’t get used to the noise. I feel queasy about it a lot. I feel queasy when I have to discuss the truth about the Korean War with my 12yo daughter who is now reading a novel about it. I feel queasy about Israel. I feel queasy about all kinds of things that happen in the world all the time, drug cartel takeover of large parts of Mexico, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, and the eerily idyllic quiet of my Hudson River town and pleasant upper middle class life in the invisible shadow of it all. It doesn’t go away, and I don’t reach any comfortable ideological resolution.

You're in the zone of lacking interest.

Interesting essay Tables. I looked up the writer and he's young, as I expected — it has that "I've read Bazin and Adorno and let me tell you about them" vibe. But I agree with at least some of his points, even though it hadn't quite occurred to me to see this in light of "slow cinema," since as he notes the film doesn't really use many long shots. But this is a good point, for one: "But one only has to shift one’s position very slightly from the one the film attempts to impose (and depends on imposing) to perceive how, for example, a montage of flowers soundtracked by the screams of camp inmates, which eventually fades to a red screen, is nothing like restraint."

And this gets at some of my own reaction:

It is difficult for me to believe that anyone aware of history emerges from The Zone of Interest genuinely edified; at the same time it’s very easy for me to believe that the film allows not being edified to feel like an achievement. At bottom, I do not see how The Zone of Interest moves us one inch closer to understanding what it takes for people, including children, to live in total indifference of mass slaughter on their doorstep — what it took in 1943 and what it takes today.

(Yes I understand the argument that it doesn't have to add anything new to our understanding to be effective as filmmaking.)

xxp Korean war was a UN action, you can blame them for that

At bottom, I do not see how The Zone of Interest moves us one inch closer to understanding what it takes for people, including children, to live in total indifference of mass slaughter on their doorstep

Well, for starters, it's the rare depiction of what it looks like to live in total indifference of mass slaughter on their doorstep.

what about Hogan's Heroes?

Yes, other than that.

As I get older, I feel like a better question would be what makes a person capable of acting in the face of such indifference to mass slaughter around them - not merely attending low stakes protests or posting or writing op-eds, but actually taking up arms or risking one's life for a cause that is not your own, that does not risk the lives of you or those you immediately love or care about, under a regime that would basically leave you alone or even reward you if you kept quiet. Because the indifference seems increasingly unremarkable to me.

I can see that perspective, but the former has probably been explored about as much as it can in a but particularly this historical context.

it's also that we've all been conditioned to think we would be the former while being different shades of the latter imo

that might sound flippant but yeah I was exposed to literally hundreds of stories about how important it is to Stand Up from my early youth, trouble is we're also discouraged from thinking we might currently be in such a situation

we definitely currently are in that situation.

I guess there are a lot of stories about the fantasy of standing up and fewer that deeply explore the reality.

I think the last thing that made me think about that reality was watching Army Of Shadows - because it showed that being in the French resistance wasn't just about exhibiting courage and being willing to die, it was also about being called upon to do some things that most people would reject as morally repugnant but which nonetheless are necessary within the context of an armed resistance

of course that's only one kind of the type of courage man alive was talking about

I think perhaps if the film has any "depth" it's less thematic than formal, right? There seems to be a lot to say about partitioning, compartmentalizing, how space is formed and patrolled, what seeps through (and what doesn't).

i really liked this framing of, um, the framing :)

i think ultimately why i have trouble w/ the idea that the film has nothing to say is that, to me, each scene emanates w/ tension between the concept of "banality" from a storytelling perspective, especially as tied to evil, and glazer's POV as a visual artist, in which banality is not a concept that exists at all. i don't think that said tension is necessarily novel in its own right, but i do think he's applying and foregrounding techniques of filmmaking -- for instance the use of color and its relationship to the story -- that feel novel and provocative to me when applied to the story of the holocaust.

i sort of said this in my earlier post but i think there is something powerful about glazer, a jew, applying his obsession with aesthetics to a place -- the location of a concentration camp -- of such efficient and total dehumanization that the very idea of aesthetic concerns feels silly at best and nauseating at worst. to me there is a defiant empathy for the victims of auschwitz in the cornucopia of color that is the hoss home and garden. he forces us to consider how simply beautiful and full of life auschwitz was, even down to the bright yellow wallpaper of its perimeter homes, just outside the reach of murder victims. the theft of life is conveyed visually just like any holocaust film, but actually not like any other holocaust film at all. and yet, to ryan's point as quoted above, the static framing of the shots nonetheless keeps the film grounded in feelings of suffocation and discomfort. we never feel the sweep of the camera, the wind underneath its wings. even when the camera moves -- such as when rudolf escapes to the lake and hedwig chases him down -- the camera remains rigid and gridded in its movements. for me, i can't reduce the film down to the idea of "banality of evil" because the subtext of glazer's art is too rich

to me there is a defiant empathy for the victims of auschwitz

Even as someone who didn't feel this movie, I agree with that. I thought there was a real depth of empathy. One of the things I worried about was whether Glazer's aesthetics would feel like they were trivializing or being cute with the underlying material, and that's not there. It's a serious movie that has respect for the subject. (The flash-forward was the one time I thought it skirted that, it's kind of the girl-in-the-red-coat moment here. But it's brief, and appropriately somber.)

Jamelle Bouie made a good point that the movie shows not how the Höss’ enjoyed their lives or thrived by repressing their consciences or ignoring whatever was going on next door, rather they knowingly enjoyed and thrived because of what Auschwitz was doing next door.

― from a prominent family of bassoon players (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:55 PM (three days ago)

i also want to contend with this point, because i think it might be tied somewhat to the idea that this film just rests its laurels on "the banality of evil." i don't think we see the hoss family enjoying their lives at all! rudolf is thriving professionally, sure, but he's an aloof, absentee father and husband w/ a dissatisfied, overburdened wife whose mother is angered and alienated by the very nature of her marriage. the couple depicted in the film is one beset by the concerns and stresses of every young working class couple of a certain era w/ a breadwinning man and a caretaking woman, and we see their relationship straining to the point of cracking as the film develops. maybe the reason why rudolf retches in the stairwell is because he had just called his wife with some celebratory news and her response is basically "i'm really busy at home raising your kids and don't care to hear about your success at work" -- intentionally or not, hedwig erases the professional glory from the moment and leaves rudolf only w/ the weight of orchestrating murder. this is the application of the concept of banality, to me, that is most powerful: the movie is not just about the "banality of evil," but the way that home life can be presented as happily banal when, in reality, toxicity swirls beneath the surface. to me this places a universal sort of complicity upon the viewer as the issues being worked thru by hedwig & rudolf are, ultimately, as much our own as not.

and again to tie this all up, i think the emotional constraints placed on the viewer via glazer's camera -- those feelings of rigidity and suffocation -- echo those felt by the couple, tho mostly acutely by hedwig, trapped in the frame and in a marriage. to me, it all ties together.

As I get older I question our fascination with "depth," what art is "deep," etc. when so many of us grew up appreciating artists in other modes for whom the exquisite surface -- or at least what we see with our naked eye -- is the point: the bafflement, the delight, the horror.

To J0rdan and ryan's points TZOI challenge my received ideas about depth. Tsai, Roy Andersson, Jia Zhang-ke, Alberto Serra, and so on, some of my favorite directors, use static tableaux to discomfiting and often devastating effect. The Sam Warren Miell essay scolds Glazer for detaching cause from effect -- for being "Manichean" -- and thus becoming the kind of Holocaust film it wants to vitiate. I don't know anymore. We'll be arguing about this one for a long time.

I don't particularly care if a film is "deep," although I do think if you're going to take on the Holocaust there's a moral imperative to respect its enormity — which, like I said, I think this movie does.

As for the rest, I don't know. We can talk about Tsai or Serra or Jia, but there are reasons Glazer's won an Oscar and they've never been nominated.

Sure, but they're filmmakers who also engage fraught historical moments.

I feel queasy when I have to discuss the truth about the Korean War with my 12yo daughter who is now reading a novel about it.

xxp Korean war was a UN action, you can blame them for that

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, 19 March 2024 16:58 (three hours ago) link

I'm kind of afraid to ask, but what is the truth about the Korean War?

"MASH" outlasted it by 8 years.

And was less funny than it by the closing seasons.

Glazer's next film will be MASH except it's just Fires on the Plain with a laugh track.

I can't wait to see how this turns out *holds up lorgnette*

Couple things which popped up in my mind - one is that to me, part of the fascination of Holocaust art is the unspoken voyeur impulse to see what happened - horror pornography - which this film resolutely denies the viewer. The other is that the phrase "banality of evil" seems to be used rhetorically as a way to distance or dismiss what the film seeks to engage with.

The irony of the denial of the voyeur impulse is the flash to the present featuring Auschwitz as museum. We the viewer are denied (most of) the recreated horror, but we are shown real-world historical evidence.

The other is that the phrase "banality of evil" seems to be used rhetorically as a way to distance or dismiss what the film seeks to engage with.

No? I don't think so. "Banality of evil" is a great phrase and an important insight. It means many things, more than Arendt probably even knew or intended at the time, since it was an observation born of specific circumstances. If anything, my frustration with the movie is its disinclination to engage with it on less obvious levels. I sort of feel like the film needed more banality, less evil? But when your focus is a more or less super-villain, a person directly responsible for mass engineered murder, an excess of evil is what you get.

But the gardening, the dealing with the kids, the awfulness of a meddlesome mother -- banality, no?

Loving your posts itt J0rdan S.!

I'm reading Dara Horn's

People Love Dead Jews

Whoops, that should be People love dead Jews in italics, not a quote

As someone who hasn't seen it (but will) it's nice to read just about the film and not the reaction his Oscar acceptance speech got. Looks that will overwhelm the film.

Though it's nice that Glazer made that speech xps

I will say that the element of *visiting* Auschwitz that was the worst was seeing people treat it like any other part of a European tour— there was a woman walking a dog through the place when I was there. And a discreet, yet still horrible gift shop. Those two sights alone were enough to make me break down— talk about banality.

Schwarzenegger was apparently super moved and solemn when he visited, but he also wrote "I'll be back" in the visitor's log

What I recall of my visit to Auschwitz was lots of school groups with bored teenagers scrolling through their phones. Also one girl upset and crying and her companions making fun of her, probably for being 'weak'. Don't remember a gift shop, did they do mugs and t-shirts?

But the gardening, the dealing with the kids, the awfulness of a meddlesome mother -- banality, no?

Yep, as far as it goes, which is basically just the family of the Butcher of Auschwitz. I think I expected or hoped for something more like the baker, cobbler and candlestick maker of Auschwitz. (Is it interesting that Hoss had a family and domestic stresses? I guess? Isn't that what one would expect if one had thought about how all this worked? Didn't all the Nazis have families?)

Maybe my thoughts are partly rooted in living near Oak Ridge, where they made the uranium for Oppenheimer's bombs. There were a few thousand people here in the region who all got jobs there, most of them with no idea what any of it was about except it was top secret. They worked as clerks and truck drivers and construction crews and phone operators and so forth. And then of course you had the actual scientists and bureaucrats running it who very much did know what they were doing. I'm sure they mostly all celebrated the success of the bombs, as they became aware of the role they played. But I wonder what they thought when (some of them, surely) eventually saw the photos and the actual results. What do we think now, who still live in a place where the national lab is a major employer?

In any case, I think their stories are more interesting than Oppenheimer's, just as I think other stories from Auschwitz would be more revealing than Hoss'.

I don’t mean that the film doesn’t deal in banality or that it isn’t its primary focus - just the phrase seems a way to tidily package that notion instead of acknowledging the monstrosity. I think that’s why the film lingers the way it does and uses those static seated shots. “You know this, you know the idea, do you? How about we sit with it in agonising stasis until it really hits you?”

thanks for the sweet words fgti :)

You all are more eloquent and smarter than me and versed in film semiotics but I am basic and found the film instilling unsettling feelings and persistent images in me that I can’t shake weeks later.

Schindler’s List did not do that for me.

You wanna talk about the banality of evil, there's still a handful of actual Nazi war criminals just walking around Earth still, which never stops being insane

As someone who hasn't seen it (but will) it's nice to read just about the film and not the reaction his Oscar acceptance speech got. Looks that will overwhelm the film.

In some quarters, sure.

Schindler’s List did not do that for me.

Yeah I wouldn’t put Schindler’s List on any pedestal, although I think it too is a mostly honorable effort. The imagery of the smokestacks is pretty powerful imo. It’s hard, the Holocaust, what do you say?

Reading the Diary of Anne Frank as a kid is still the thing that hit me hardest tbh.

I thought this was mostly great. I think it is relatively novel to have a film that basically just focuses on the domestic life of a nazi mass murderer - with the actual horror barely off stage, close enough that it permeates every single interaction. I liked the cold focus of it, didn't particularly like the flash forward to the cleaners - that felt to me like an authorial intervention that wasn't necessary. I also wasn't enamoured of the Polish girl and the hiding of the apples. I think I read this really did happen, but is it representative of how Poles near the camps actually reacted? Lanzmann's interviews of nearby residents in Shoah suggest otherwise. One striking thing is the difference between how Hoss and his wife are portrayed - she is a complete monster with no redeeming features at all, but he is often the caring father reading to his kids etc... not sure what I think about that.

Isn’t that the thing though, you can find him “sympathetic” for seeming more human even though he’s actually a monster. Wife just doesn’t bother to hide it.

Yeah I guess so, which makes it all the more disturbing...

After seeing the movie I watched an interesting BBC documentary on the children of Nazis, which features Hoss's grandson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTKyseLW-yE

Although Hoss's grandson actually turns out to be (surprise surprise) an exploitative charlatan: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/high-profile-grandson-of-nazi-commander-convicted-of-fraud-1.4330515

"Lanzmann's interviews of nearby residents in Shoah suggest otherwise"

there are also many verifiable accounts of Poles who risked their own lives to help Jews, it's hardly fanfic.

I read an amazing account by a Jewish New York dentist who survived WWII hiding with a few family members from the Nazis in the Polish countryside. Their encounters with non-Jewish Poles as I recall were mixed. There was one group that let them stay with them for a while, but then another group was actively trageting Jews in the midst of the war chaos. It was a totally harrowing story. His brother was murdered by Nazis right in front of him. He and his sister made it through, I don't remember if either of their parents did. He was only like 11 or 12 when the war started.

That is true, but ZZ’s point is how representative it is, given how few people escaped from Auschwitz. I guess there are two ways of looking at it: ZZ’s as outlined above, and the point the film feels like it’s making, which is that even in the darkest point there is still a small point of light.

Glazer said this about it fwiw:

He pauses for a long moment. “That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. 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.”

I also wasn't enamoured of the Polish girl and the hiding of the apples. I think I read this really did happen, but is it representative of how Poles near the camps actually reacted?

Later we hear off-screen dialogue of a guard ordering an inmate to be drowned in the river because he was fighting over an apple with someone. So even that shred of humanity curdles into horror.

maybe im just naive but when people say there’s an undercurrent of fascism lurking behind the facade of banal every day domestic suburban life.. i don’t see it

ditto the complacency and shock at familiarity we’re supposed to feel watching this. like, yes some nazis lived comfortable suburban domestic lives. but so did many of the people who fought against them

Re the Polish girl, I can definitely understand the director's emotional need for having some pinhole of light in something that's just so fucking dark. I'm just not sure that was the right way to do it, given that the complicity of a lot of Poles in the Holocaust is still very much a live issue.

glazer explains this in the guardian article but the real life polish woman who planted the apples lived in the home abutting auschwitz that they used for the filming. she died before filming started but glazer spoke to her personally at some point and some of her possessions were in the film. quibble w/ her inclusion in the film that’s fair game as an artistic choice of course, but i just think it’s worth noting that she is not like some random or mythical historical figure he read about and inserted into the film

Fair enough!

Son of Saul director László Nemes shared a statement with the Guardian on Friday in which he strongly condemned Glazer, saying he “should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust.

“Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”

Jeez, a lot of creatives are furious with Glazer's Oscar speech, but this guy sounds like he wants to kill him. iirc Nemes' movie was criticised for being exploitative and too soon by some at the time of its release and tbh it isn't one I'd rewatch these days because it's just too bleak and unrelentingly explicit in portraying the whole grisly process of the killing factory, and basically it isn't as good a movie as TZoI is because of that pummeling the viewer with death and suffering approach imo.

"he has no understanding of history" comes up so often with Israeli supporters of genocide that it's as if this was the script handed them last October, and it probably was.

maybe im just naive but when people say there’s an undercurrent of fascism lurking behind the facade of banal every day domestic suburban life.. i don’t see it

― flopson, Wednesday, 20 March 2024 00:36 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ditto the complacency and shock at familiarity we’re supposed to feel watching this. like, yes some nazis lived comfortable suburban domestic lives. but so did many of the people who fought against them

― flopson, Wednesday, 20 March 2024 00:38 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The point is surely not that suburban domesticity is inherently fascist, it's that the two are not incompatible. Which again you can say "well big deal", but the shock of recognition is not "they lived in suburban homes just like me", it's "they lived in suburban homes while ignoring and/or actively collaborating with the unspeakable...like me?".

It’s such terrible criticism. You cannot watch this film and tell me Glazer didn’t understand, it’s the fact that he does understand. I thought his speech at the Oscars, with his voice clearly shaking, must have been a huge deal to him not just for the award itself but for what he wanted to say. By his own account, he found this film extremely difficult to make because it WAS extremely personal to him and his family. What these letter signatories are trying to say is, I don’t like what he said. Instead they make themselves look even worse with the ignorance of their criticism.

It’s horrific to read these comments about this man:

I ask Glazer what made him persevere with the project each time he felt the urge to give up and walk away. “I don’t know for sure. My heritage, maybe. Inter-generational trauma. Fear. Anger. All of that stuff. Most Jewish families have a history with the event because it was so enormous. Just looking through the archives of Auschwitz and going though my family names, I discovered there are a lot of them. So, I think it’s just in you.”

He pauses again. “The reason I made this film is to try to restate our close proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past. For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware – and fearful – that these things are on the rise again with the growth of rightwing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”

it might be that "understanding history" requires one to acknowledge that western civilisation has an uncanny knack of rationalising genocide, over and over again, ad infinitum.

incredible that supposed artists like Nemes have been drawn into parroting culture war

total and absolute Palestine erasure is the only way to be accepted into this clique. I cringe at the idea of emotional oscar acceptance speeches, but that was about as real and genuine as it gets.

worse still, if Nemes had watched the film with his brain switched even 10% on he'd know what a responsibility was undertaken

He probably liked it before the speech.

The speech isn't inconsistent with the film though. Argh

Danny Cohen, the film's executive producer, doesn't get it either:

My support for Israel is unwavering. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas.

Just saw Birth for the first time which I thought was great. Many stylistically similar things - the static framing, the focus on music, the silences, the awkwardness of domestic scenes...

xp - Glazer's career is probably dependant on how the politics of Israel and Gaza go in the next few years.

xp yes Birth is terrific and weird and unsettling.

and hilarious

indeed

The “apple girl” was a real life figure in the resistance, Glazer thanked her in his acceptance speech, and filmed in her home and even used her actual bicycle

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandra_Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk

I still haven’t seen this! I love how Glazer works with composers tho— both Birth and Under The Skin have such iconic scores.

I saw it! It’s amazing! What a crazy film!!

I was told there was “no score” but I counted four cues in addition to the opening and closing. Mostly braaams. Dune 2 had fewer braaams.

I love Glazer’s weird visual sensibilities, switching from handheld to so-hi-def-it-looks-fake in “Under The Skin”, casually moving from night vision to real vision in this film. The piano moment had me in tears.

Lots of visual artifacts, too, especially on Mutti’s tour of the garden. Little blips and errors that seemed intentional. Really unsettling.

Sandra Huller is such a delight to watch I loved seeing her in another great movie

The sound design wasn’t as technically virtuosic as I anticipated, just blunt. It was great. It felt like a supporting cast member. I love Jonathan Glazer. I might write him a fan letter tbh

Yeah me too.
The VF piece about making the film noted that they used AI upscaling to match the effectively-1K resolution of the FLIR night camera to the 4K daylight cameras, too. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/zone-of-interest-jonathan-glazer-shot-list-awards-insider

That’s fascinating. And of course it was AI, that’s why it looked so weird and artificial. The ground looked so weird.

The dolly shots lept off the screen, the film was so static otherwise. There was this incredibly shot sequence, just before the grandmother leaves, with a red light from a pane above the bedroom door moving around the frame from shot to shot. I need to rewatch it, but it felt as if every cut would place the red light right where your eyes had been attending to darkened action— like it was tricking you, scaring you into looking at it

“Of course it was AI”; that was me being like “oh ya I should’ve guessed”

I mentioned Ozu upthread and yeah it adds huge import when the camera moves in a locked-off film. I think I recall a couple of steadicam / following shots and a zoom or dolly in to the door peephole … perhaps to the flowers too?
Glazer is fond of the slow push-in as an emotional accelerant but I don’t think he used it in this.

Astonishing essay by Lillian Crawford https://www.a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/film/the-zone-of-interest-glazer-ethics/

Great essay

Something I didn't get while watching (and realised afterward while reading) was that the reference to "Kanada" refers to the warehouse wherein the Auschwitz prisoners's belongings were kept

hence that gybe ep title *mug falls from hand*

!

apparently the Hebrew on the cover reads “formless and empty”

I thought the dog seemed very convincing, as stupid as that sounds! In some movies dogs seem too much like professional actor dogs going through the doggy motions. Then I read that the black Weimeraner dog is actually Huller's own dog.

I’m watching a second time tonight. This is maybe the best movie I’ve ever seen. I wish A24 had solicited Oscar votes with a “Watch it twice!” campaign. So many details. The quick cut from “bring chocolate” to an upward shot of Hoss overseeing something horrible. A shot of Hoss overseeing a pool party and a subtle and yet unmistakable death train smoke trail just over the greenhouse. So many intentional artifacts, little flashes and sparks to make certain bucolic sequences uncomfortable.

I was thinking this was the actual anti-war film Malick sought to make with Thin Red Line, but comparing the two is insulting to both

"Flashes and sparks" reminded me how unusual the grading in this film is, it could be read as e.g. old Ektachrome for some kind of period feel, but it feels more like one of those days where it's overcast but painfully bright. Almost as if the sun is hostile, irradiating the zone with ultraviolet.
I don't know how to articulate it but the detachment and observational quality of the film somehow makes it expand in scope. For something which is "about" such a specific period and milieu, it reaches far beyond, which I know is Glazer's intention. I haven't thought this much about a film in a long time.

I thought the last thing I needed was a Jonathan Glazer movie that was loosely based on an Amis novel, went into this with such low enthusiasm. I'm obsessed with it now and have watched it 4 times. It is a masterpiece.

Similarly, the Amis connection put me off for a while!

I thought I had read the book even though I didn’t recognize any of the story at all, but I turned out the one I read was House of Meetings

Feel like this movie is a true crime thing where we already know all the details of the crime so it is just kind of there bleeding in the background through the soundtrack and occasionally into the frame though a plume of smoke or otherwise.

I can think of only one thing about this movie I didn’t like, the rest was perfect. That one thing: the synth blorts on the fade-to-red. Didn’t need ‘em!

I would’ve loved for all music to be stripped away outside of the entracte and exit music

I would've loved Martin Amis' credit stripped away.

You know because of the faintish sound of the dialogue due to no visible mics for quite a long time I though that German speaking was just sort of ambient and incidental and that once the action really got going they would switch to English so that we could really understand them, men, in all senses, do u see?

Overheard an old bloke on the train boasting about having read the Amis novel as prep for the film.

Really been resisting seeing this and didn’t know why…just realised why…I keep thinking that this is gonna be Glazer doing a ‘Haneke’…

And that makes you NOT want to see it?

Absolutely…shit like that sticks in my claw…’The White Ribbon’ isn’t my favourite Haneke but the trailer seemed to have the same aesthetic.

It's not very Haneke-ish fwiw.

My daughter immediately clocked the influence of Jeanne Dielman on this and I had to agree.

Yeah

Knew I should've trusted my judgement and not seen this.

Blaming Kubrick for this, mostly.

Hadn't seen Richard Brody's jaw dropping take linked previously https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-zone-of-interest-is-an-extreme-form-of-holokitsch

"Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully; if he did, he’d have centered the movie strictly on Hedy’s and the children’s experiences and points of view, noting the hints and traces of the death camp in and near the house and amid the landscape. The movie would have shown Rudolf and his activities solely through their eyes, thus making their surmises and their doubts, or their willful indifferences, all the more conspicuous—the movie wouldn’t have noted any more details of the horrors than they did."

Man I love how Brody is trying to make it better. You are not a filmmaker.

---

My daughter immediately clocked the influence of Jeanne Dielman on this and I had to agree.

― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, 24 March 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I think it's more of a Kubrick thing. Cinema as a kind of museum piece: this is the Nazi garden, and over here is the room where they looked over their evil plans, and further on we have the hall where a Nazi ball took place. Footage of the museum is only place this could go.

The nightvision stuff is terrible too. I wouldn't know what this was about without reading about it.

“I didn’t get it” = “terrible” is not an argument I’m swayed by

The movie introduced a Polish maid as a character and later showed her secretly placing fruit in hidden locations within the camp. It was far too much to expect anybody to glean her motivation, or obtain any sense of poetry from its portrayal

It's discussed up thread, I wasn't a fan of that either, but it's based on a real person, so I guess I can give it a pass.

I am a fan of this movie, but I will admit I was confused by the night vision interludes at the first couple appearances.

I thought it was something to do with the dream imagination of the Hoss daughter who didn't go to bed on my first watch, which I'll admit was getting it badly wrong

Was that the housekeeper that also plays piano? She finds that scrap of music left behind and plays that (real life) melody, from a Yiddish resistance song, whose lyrics are put on screen (in I guess another example of breaking the fourth wall).

“I didn’t get it” = “terrible” is not an argument I’m swayed by

― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

That's not the argument.

If you got the very moving (and yes, real) episode the night vision stuff was trying to depict then good for you.

I wouldn't also relate the piece of music to what was found on the ground by the maid, unless I read about it in an interview with Glazer.

I liked all of his films before this and his speech at the Oscars was good too. Shame about what he was accepting the award for.

If you’re gonna be using words like “shame” I’d hope you’d launch a more coherent argument against this film beyond “I hated it” and “I blame Kubrick”. Tell us why!

I have said this in my previous post. It's just a very well designed piece. It doesn't care to do anything else beyond showing us the furniture.

This guy's "arguments" are pretty much always ad hominem attacks for those who haven't been following. His rabbit turds are all over ILX for you to savor.

Was missing Morbs. mucho yesterday because he could back up his zingers with substance with the added plus that they were usually funny

It doesn't care to do anything else beyond showing us the furniture.

I think the problem is you actually watched a different film.

Please to avoid a pile-on, I was hoping xyzzzz would have more to say about why he disliked it

Generally felt that the main characters had much more going on than your average Kubrick film; I enjoy Kubrick but didn’t feel much similarities here aside from some cinematography choices

Sorry. Hopefully you can draw him out of his shell.

I guess I've seen xyzzzz pull this often enough that I know a more thoughtful take isn't forthcoming.

I just have no patience for the whiff of superiority in posts like:

Knew I should've trusted my judgement and not seen this.

previous Kubrick blaming I have read on here is that he created the space for a wasteman like Nolan to exist in. I always thought that was an unfair criticism because for starters all Nolan movies are rank garbage and not fit to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Barry Lyndon or Paths of Glory. And I can't even be bothered thinking about the rest because I quite like Kubrick, apart from a few of his overrated stinkers - he was pretty damned good!

Aside from just remembering something about Kubrick having a script for an unrealized holocaust movie. I didn't think much about him while watching TZoI.

you could say he was outside your zone of interest

A little "you're no fun anymore" creeping in here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6mlQu83XTQ

There is something Kubrickian in its cold-eyed detachment, although I think Glazer complicates that detachment multiple times. Kubrick makes more sense to me as a reference point than "slow cinema," which I didn't really see or feel this film as part of.

As a not-particular-fan of the film, I share some of Brody's issues but I also think he goes way overboard. I don't think "kitsch" really applies here conceptually at all. Anthony Lane's review, which is more middling is somewhat closer to my own feelings about it: "Glazer achieves what he sets out to do, and you have to admire his tenacity, his technical skill, and his tact. Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.

Yet one has to ask: Is this movie couched in its most effective form? In making the same point, however morally urgent, over and over again, does the film fortify or weaken its case?"

I realize that most of these criticisms including mine proceed from the position of, "He could have made a different/better film about the same thing." And that wishing for a different movie doesn't do anything about the one we have. But, you know, wishing for a better version of the same thing is the right of any filmgoer.

Was missing Morbs. mucho yesterday because he could back up his zingers with substance with the added plus that they were usually funny

― Make Me Smile (Come Around and See Me) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Kinda fucked up to say things like this. Morbs is dead, what are you attempting here with your silly comparison?

I also thought this movie was nothing. I feel like I got no extra out of watching it than I already understood from a few brief synopses I had read prior.

I am pulling nothing. I did not like this film, for a very clear easy to read reason. If you are struggling with this, that isn't my fault.

Just very flatly conceptual. I recently scanned past an article about the woman it was based on where she was wearing the same dress and had the ugly Hummel figurine version of 90s bjork hairdo which was very of course. As a movie it had 'a point' and it 'illustrated' that point. I thought the Oscar speech was much better than the film.

I am pulling nothing. I did not like this film, for a very clear easy to read reason. If you are struggling with this, that isn't my fault.

I think the Kubrick comparison is rude to Kubrick, not because I love him but because there's a situating of the viewer in Kubrick's films that give them a form that is discursive. You experience the meaning in some way, there's an effort to make this possible. I detected no counterpart here. This film wasn't Kubrick it was Petzold but with a message. For me personally this was too glib.

Kubrick isn't the only director who used spaces and detachment.

No.

I blame Chantal Ackerman

Or Chantal Akerman even

Who is with Morbius now, checking out the Kim’s Video branch in Heaven.

Well one of the things that makes Glazer interesting is that whatever roots you can see, he’s always felt aesthetically distinct. You can see it even in his TV ads. So any comparison will go so far. What this mostly felt like to me is a Glazer film.

Isn’t there some kind of Comic Book Guy/Mensa board you can go to where they appreciate your sort of genius?
― Make Me Smile (Come Around and See Me) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

At least I stopped you from posting those YouTube links

If you are all wondering why James is mad...

Hahaha I just posted one this morning on another thread you soiled with one of your “insights.”

I think the Kubrick comparison is rude to Kubrick, not because I love him but because there's a situating of the viewer in Kubrick's films that give them a form that is discursive. You experience the meaning in some way, there's an effort to make this possible. I detected no counterpart here. This film wasn't Kubrick it was Petzold but with a message. For me personally this was too glib.

― plax (ico), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Hmm do you mean the last few Petzold films here?

The Glazer seemed like very well researched and relentless with the way it's put together in terms of settings and scenes and it's sound of plops and scream.

I think it's fine to disagree on the merits of this film. The important thing is for us all to be having a good time online.

Googling "Mensa msg board" is how I get my kicks online.

I don't know if anyone needs Corey Robin's take, but fwiw

Finally saw Zone of Interest. It was meh, but one thing it does well— not seen in many other Holocaust films—is show how much the Nazis saw themselves as settler colonists in the East. You can see why Glazer made the speech he did at the Oscars. The movie is not simply about the

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) March 31, 2024

Thinking back on the parts of the movie that retained any of Levi’s score, I realised that it blasts in in contexts where the Holocaust IS acknowledged - the Stygian hellscapes with the girl hiding apples for the prisoners was the inverse, visually and sonically, of the rest of the film. We’re switching from absence to overwhelming, unbearable presence and so does the score. The flare-outs to white and red likewise.

“hellscape”, sorry

Man I love how Brody is trying to make it better. You are not a filmmaker.

This is a pretty normal thing for a film critic to do--point out what you don't like, and elaborate via some alternate way of doing it. I don't think it suggests pretensions to being a filmmaker.

Don't often see that. Brody suggested a pretty different film that would depend on several other factors for a successful execution.

"previous Kubrick blaming I have read on here is that he created the space for a wasteman like Nolan to exist in."

Yeah that's bollocks but it sounds like the points of comparisons would be how indulged they are by studios to make anything they like. The filmmaking is different though it's superficially epic at times.

the petzold comparison i had in mind was more to the films he made with Hoss, in particular the last (historical) ones: Barbara, Phoenix. Certainly this film seemed to me to have a self-consciously Berlin -school type aesthetic (jostling flatness, valent banality, a fairly humourless 'critical' mode) but with more bombastic final delivery and very straightforward 'message'. The first time I saw phoenix it hit me hard but in retrospect it feels very on the nose. its possible however that my negative reaction is partly due to not reading the booking page properly and seeing it in screen 2 at the ICA, which I hate, as I would have gone somewhere else had I realised it wasn't being shown on the main screen.

I'm surprised here that I'm actually familiar with Petzold's movies and have seen a few of them -just not familiar with his name.

my post is appallingly written and it seems like the last comment about screens is about the movie phoenix but is supposed to be about zone of interest.

I remember liking Phoenix at the time but I don't remember enough here to properly compare.

I think you might like some of his films, Calzino.

xps

I've seen Phoenix and Barbera and possibly one more, my memory is a bit foggy on them but Phoenix I completely recall because at the time I was massively into Rossellini's war trilogy and was drawn to any movie set in postwar Berlin.

I like the phrase "valent banality." How does it apply to Barbara?

Nina Hoss has a good part in the latest Radu Jude film

Barbara is not quite Ostalgie, but definitively taps into a similar vibe.

https://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169134837/in-barbara-a-new-look-at-life-behind-the-wall
Hadn’t realized Petzold was East German himself, d’oh!

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/go-east

my post is appallingly written and it seems like the last comment about screens is about the movie phoenix but is supposed to be about zone of interest.

― plax (ico), Tuesday, 2 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Would be funny if all it took to flip your opinion would be to see this at ICA screen one.

https://deadline.com/2024/04/joaquin-phoenix-joel-coen-todd-haynes-jonathan-glazers-oscar-speech-open-letter-1235876708/

150 signatories from the arts supporting Glazer's Oscar speech. Proud to see so many colleagues, friends, former bosses as signatories.

We are proud Jews who denounce the weaponization of Jewish identity and the memory of the Holocaust to justify what many experts in international law, including leading Holocaust scholars, have identified as a “genocide in the making.” We reject the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom. We stand with all those calling for a permanent ceasefire, including the safe return of all hostages and the immediate delivery of aid into Gaza, and an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of and siege on Gaza.

Good to see.

I watched this last night. I'd say it's one of the more memorable contemporary films I've seen in a long while. It's hard to shake many sequences, sounds and images from memory. I think it's a masterpiece and one of the great horror films.

A materialist reading of the film.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/staging-genocide-zone-of-interest

Provocative and interesting thanks - articulated several things I strongly feel about the film, in ways I hadn’t been able to express clearly.