[COLUMN] The Zone of Interest Understands That Not Looking Is a Choice | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The Zone of Interest begins and ends with nothing. The film opens on a white screen that shifts to a black screen. It is a minute before a picture appears on screen. It closes with a cut to black, with another long pause between the final shot of the movie and the credit for director Jonathan Glazer. At various points throughout, the film goes blank. It cuts to a completely black screen or a completely white screen. This is as much about what the audience doesn’t see as what it does.

The bulk of The Zone of Interest is set within the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp, focusing on the life of Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). However, this is not a typical Holocaust movie. Very few of the atrocities are depicted on screen. Instead, The Zone of Interest is largely focused on the domestic resident that the Höss family maintained within the camp, an idyllic family home surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire.

“That’s the camp wall?” asks Linna Hensel (Imogen Kogge), Hedwig’s mother, as the pair contemplate the pool that has been built in the back garden to accommodate the Höss children. “Yes, that ‘s the camp wall,” Hedwig concedes. “We planted more vines at the back to cover it.” There is a single shot in the movie of Rudolf within the camp proper, an intense close-up on his face as he goes about his daily duties. Steam clouds the frame, another of the film’s distinctive whiteouts.

The Zone of Interest is a companion piece to László Nemes’ Son of Saul, another intensely focused film set at Auschwitz. Like Glazer, Nemes is careful about what he shows, keeping the camera trained on Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig). The camp’s horrors are often in the background and out of focus. “You cannot represent the horrors of the Holocaust,” Nemes told The Washington Post.  “You will only end up with imagery, and give the audience the impression that they can understand it. No one can.”

However, there are a number of appreciable differences between The Zone of Interest and Son of Saul. Nemes shot Son of Saul in the classic 4:3 Academy ratio, which will always seem narrow and claustrophobic, whether watched in a cinema or in a theatre. In contrast, Glazer shoots The Zone of Interest in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio that completely fills a modern television set. It was shot on a Sony Venice digital camera allowing for a crisp clear image.

The result is a fascinating paradox. When The Zone of Interest chooses to show its audience something, it shows that something completely. The image takes up the full screen. There are no black bars at the top or the bottom to distance the viewer from the image. Everything is in focus. The image is crisp and clear. The colors are vivid. Glazer and his cinematographer, Lukasz Zal frame shots to emphasize the physical space and the environment in which these characters exist.

The first shot of the movie, after those white and black screens, is a family picnic on a lake. Many of the film’s cameras were embedded in the sets, operated remotely so the cast could fully inhabit the space without the intrusion of the crew. Like Glazer’s other films, the framing is very precise and intricate. Interior shots are often framed through doorways and down hallways to give a sense of a fixed environment through which these characters are moving.

There is a sense of these characters inhabiting structures, moving through constructed spaces. This emphasis on architecture is evocative, conjuring the memory of Albert Speer, “Hitler’s architect.” These days, Speer is perhaps best known as the basis for “the Speer Myth”, the narrative of an innocent technocratic functionary who was ultimately oblivious to (and therefore not complicit in) the horrors that he facilitated.

The Zone of Interest is very concerned with architecture. Early in the movie, Rudolf sits in his living room with Kurt Prüfer (Thomas Neumann) and Fritz Sander (Benjamin Utzerath), who sold “the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology” to the Nazis. They are selling their “ring crematorium. “So, burn, cool, unload, reload,” Sander explains. Prüfer makes the hard sell, “And… continuously.” The meaning of the meeting is hidden through euphemism, but it’s there.

A clumsier movie would perhaps argue that these characters are living in denial of the atrocities happening across the wall. The Zone of Interest is savvier than that. Although the film is directed by a Briton and financed by American and British companies, the characters all (understandably) speak German. This feels like a deliberate choice. While the German dialogue is often naturalistic and low in the sound mix, the subtitles print the characters’ speech to screen as literal text.

Everybody knows. They only pretend not to know when it is polite to do so. Early in the film, Hedwig’s friends gossip about a woman named Helga. They note that her husband “hits her as well.” They ask, “Haven’t you noted the bruises on her arms?” The choice not to look – or the choice not to acknowledge what one sees – is an active and continuous one. Marta knows where Rudolph gets the fur coats that he sends her. She knows what she’s asking when she asks for “chocolate, if you see it.”

The inmates at the concentration camp haunt the filming, drifting in and out of shot. In one early sequence, Rudolf takes off his boots before going inside, as if not to trek any of the outside world into the home. As soon as the door closes, an inmate scurries up to collect the boots. He cleans and then replaces the boot, silently. The prisoner might as well be invisible to the people inside the house, but only because they want him to be.

Rudolf and Hedwig harbor no illusions about what they are doing. Hedwig confesses to her mother that Rudolf doesn’t separate his work and personal lives, admitting that he is “working non-stop, even when he’s home.” She jokes, “Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.” Hedwig lashes out at the house staff when she’s displeased. “Don’t forget you live well in our house,” she warns one. Later, she chides another, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”

Rudolf might wash the stains off his white clothes, and scrub his children clean when he realizes the ash from the crematoriums has been emptied into the river where they play, but this perfect family life isn’t at odds with the atrocity next door. “We’re living how we dreamed we would,” Hedwig tells her husband. “Since we were 17. Beyond how we dreamed. Out of the city, finally. Everything we want. On our doorstep.” This domesticity is built on that violence. “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do,” Hedwig boasts. “Go East. Living space. This is our living space.”

The horror is never far away. It is barely hidden. The smoke from the crematoriums is visible at multiple points. Screams and gunshots sound in the background. A child playing in a bedroom hears the soldiers beating an inmate outside, “Drown him in the river.” Late in the movie, almost an instinctive response to the evil that he lives with, Rudolph ends up retching in a stairwell. He looks down a dark corridor, and is confronted with a vision of how history will judge what he has done.

The Zone of Interest makes an interesting companion piece to Oppenheimer, another recent Second World War film. That is another visually maximalist film that is very deliberate in what it chooses not to show. Oppenheimer has attracted some criticism for its decision not to depict the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, it shows J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) refusal to look at the consequences of his actions, his decision to look away from atrocity.

Both The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer return to a similar aural motif to underscore this thematic point. In The Zone of Interest, the baby Annagret (Cecylia Pekala, Anastazja Drobniak) is constantly wailing off-screen, often unacknowledged. At three key points in Oppenheimer, the title character ignores the cries of his young children. The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer are about how declining to acknowledge such brutality is an active choice.

Indeed, in both cases, the audience is invited to sit in some complicity. From a modern vantage point, it’s impossible to watch Oppenheimer or The Zone of Interest without being aware of what is not being presented on screen. The dropping of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust are two monumental events in the past century. As such, the omission is folded into the movie, and the audience is forced to contend with its absence and to sit in their knowledge of what is not shown.

One of the most persistent myths about the Holocaust – one largely disproven – is that the German people were oblivious and innocent to the crimes being committed. This belief is inherently comforting, particularly compared with the alternative possibility: that human beings will go along, and even actively participate, in such horrors if afforded even the shallowest veneer of normality. It’s a harrowing and unsettling thought, and it permeates The Zone of Interest.

Glazer underscores this point by offering a contrasting image. Twice during the movie, The Zone of Interest cuts to the camp late at night. In black-and-white night vision, quite literally an inversion of the Hösses’ reality, a young local girl sneaks into the camp to provide scraps of food to the inmates. It’s a small gesture, but an exceptional one. It underscores that there were alternatives to just accepting these horrific realities and that even small acts of decency were better than complicity.

This isn’t a concept tied to a particular moment. Glazer argues that The Zone of Interest is about something more universal. “I hope the film that we made, what it’s trying to do is to talk to the capacity within each of us for violence,” he explained at the Cannes premiere. Certainly, there is a conversation to be had about the normalization of political violence in modern America and the extent to which people will go along with horrific ideas if those ideas are normalized.

Writing about the film, Jonathan Friedland contended that “whatever can be shown on screen will always be less hellish than the reality.” This is true, but it misses the real horror of The Zone of Interest. Even when that reality isn’t shown on screen, the audience still knows. The camera can’t do the heavy lifting for us. It’s up to the viewer themselves to reckon with it.