By Pedro Meerbaum
March
The Zone of Interest follows a historical family drama. The mother, played by Sandra Hüller, wants to raise her family in their current house — outside of the big city where she can grow her garden and spend Sundays by the lake with the children. Meanwhile, the father, played by Christian Friedel, is forced into a personal dilemma as he is promoted in his military career and must now move to Berlin. Except Friedel's character wasn't just any military personnel and the house wasn't in any city. They lived in Auschwitz, Poland, and the father, Herr Höss, is the commandant of the concentration camp that shares its walls with the family garden.
Director Jonathan Glazer takes an unconventional approach to portraying the Holocaust: he expects his audience to be aware of what is happening in the backgrounds of his passive landscapes without explicitly showing the violence of the concentration camps. Unlike other movies on the same topic, including Schindler's List or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Glazer spends no time exploring or dramatizing the struggles of the victims, he rather focuses completely on the routine of this specific family. The movie's ability to discuss such a weighted historical event has been a heated topic as award season continues to highlight the mastery of Glazer, leading it to be considered "controversial" in online discussions. But what is clear is that it once again brings up an important question: how can one produce a movie about the Holocaust? The risk of trivializing, minimizing or even abusing real stories haunts filmmakers whenever they are tasked with producing art on one of history's biggest regrets.
Austrian director Michael Haneke, famous for works like "Funny Games" and "Piano Teacher," posed a scathing critique of Spielberg's Schindler's List in an interview with the Hollywood Times: "The idea, the mere idea, of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question of whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water — that to me is unspeakable." He then proceeds to describe the 1994 Oscar-winning movie as a film with "24 lies per second at the service of truth, or the service of the attempt to find truth.” It is difficult to accuse Spielberg's movie of being exploitative of the Holocaust when its production surrounded a conversation with real victims and an attempt to rejuvenate the popular memory of the event. At the same time, it is not possible to distance Spielberg's production from the mere fact that it is a Hollywood production, a movie bonded by the economic and ideological needs of the culture industry and the necessity to keep the work entertaining to its audience. Thus, when Spielberg creates a Hollywoodian adaptation of Schindler's List, there is a legitimate concern about whether he has, like in his classic Jurassic Park, made the Holocaust into a theme park.
It is true, however, that newer generations have been socialized through these works. As we distance ourselves, chronologically, from the 1940s, and as the memories of older generations begin to fade, the role of transmitting Holocaust-related stories lies within movies. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has become a staple in Western education systems and a necessary addendum in history classes. Understanding, then, that Holocaust-related movies go beyond their statuses as films and transcend into a tool for public memory, another question is raised: What should be the aim of Holocaust cinema?
The Zone of Interest engages with this dilemma and focuses instead on the other side of the wall. Sandra Hüller mentions to W magazine that during the filming process, the actors had to stay void – even as they played with kids in the garden they had to actively demonstrate little to no dramatization. A direct response to traditional Hollywoodian cinema, where the directors attempt to juice out drama out of all scenes and create entertainment above all. This is reflective of Glazer's attempt to produce a movie that showcases the ordinary aspects of a Nazi family. It is contradictory to decades of film-making where Nazis were portrayed as "cardboard villains," with no characteristics but their evilness – a portrayal that is both fair and counterproductive.
The audience is led to believe that the evil present in the Holocaust was an exceptional case. The Nazis are presented to them as nothing more than villains, as individuals who are so distanced from the viewers that their lives become unfathomable in the 21st century. The Zone of Interest reminds viewers that this is not true. As Glazer puts it himself: "I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
Glazer reminds the viewers of just how dangerous movies on the Holocaust can be. They are, ultimately, vessels for narratives on the event, shaping how we view this piece of history and how we understand the processes that lead to it. Once it becomes enthralled by the culture of entertainment, Holocaust cinema turns itself into a counteractive tool – it distances us from what happened even further. It makes us forget that Auschwitz is not only a museum.
It is inconceivable to imagine any Holocaust movie that is not controversial. Even The Zone of Interest in its minimal narrative storytelling has failed to escape the debates – is it fair to exclude the victims when discussing the Holocaust? Is the movie adding anything, really, to the construction of our knowledge of the events? The questions are not up for me to answer, and yet I find them crucial. Holocaust cinema only works when it poses questions, rather than answers – when it leads the audience into the uncomfortable position of questioning: "What would I have done," or more importantly "What am I not doing now."