zone of interest (w&d jonathan glazer)

We watched this film in Montevideo at the exact same time it was being garlanded on the west coast of the United States. When I got home I watched Glazer’s honourable speech, the only one with the courage to mention Gaza, something that watching his film at this moment in history inevitably calls to mind.

There have been so many films that have used the Holocaust as a dramatic trope. Some with more justification than others. The issue with the events is how to present them. To seek to show or communicate the reality of a reality that will always be beyond representation. As such the Holocaust represents an artistic and philosophical conundrum and one that is particular to cinema, that most ‘realistic’ of the arts. Glazer is more aware than many of the fact. His film deliberately veers beyond realism from the very opening shot of blackness, which is held for long enough to make the audience question if all is right in the cinema, the world. Another sequence involves a flower dissolving, a la Jarman, to a red screen, which is again held. There are white out moments too. At other points a girl is seen in infra-red, leaving fruit to be discovered - a storyline which only became clear after the film had finished.

However, the majority of the film occurs in naturalistic colour, as the Hoss family go about the daily lives in the shadow of atrocity. All of which brings to the fore one of the key problematics of Glazer’s film. Rather than pondering the realism of what is seen, we end up pondering the aesthetics. The shots of flowers are beautiful. Is there room for beauty in the world he depicts? Is it appropriate? The issue isn’t a moral one: it’s that the question itself leads towards a contemplation of aesthetics rather than the subject matter which the film is dancing around. A similar thing occurs with the award winning sound mix, which seeks to represent the off-stage atrocities. In the end, it felt to this viewer as though this tool was used to hammer home the film’s point. Zone of Interest seeks to be a subtle film, but it utilises cinematic recourses which are profoundly unsubtle. It’s a film about the holocaust which ends up as a film about cinema and its limits. Every visual or auditory nuance seems to throw into question the project as a whole.

Having said all of this, and having returned to see Glazer’s brief discourse, it needs to be acknowledged that the filmmaker is only raising these questions because he is pushing the limits of the medium, in all sorts of ways, some of them the he could never have anticipated as he was making the film. Just as the bricks and mortar of the concentration camp overshadow the Hoss’s home, so the barbarity of the unbridled attack on Gaza’s civilians will always be destined to overshadow the walls of Glazer’s Zone of Interest.