by Beatrice Leeming
There exists an established filmic tradition that has dealt with the ethics of representation and subscribed to the pedagogical power of cinema. The Holocaust has been documented and dramatized with progressive intensity since its occurrence. The perpetrators have been satirised, the victims heroized, and the narrative memorialised in both powerful and problematic cinema. The taboo on representation has repeatedly been broken.[1]
Indeed, the evolution of Holocaust cinema maps the evolution of European Holocaust memorialisation more broadly, early postwar screenings of liberator images insisting on a culture of shame and responsibility amongst the German public. The semantic symbolism of specific liberator images – recycled in Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard – secured a visual shorthand of specific shots as ‘representative’ of the historic event, irrespective of their dubious provenance and selective perspective.[2] The persistent absence of recognition for an ‘honest’ relationship with the past was – partly – qualified by the 1979 miniseries, Holocaust, which witnessed the event through individual drama, graphic violence interrupting scenes of domesticity. By the 1980s, when the absence of public memorialisation more explicitly troubled academic and second-generation consciousness, Lanzmann answered with Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary that Geoffrey Hartman describes as ‘an epic intervention that creates a rupture on the plane of consciousness like that of Auschwitz on the plane of history.’[3] Whilst influenced by Nuit et Brouillard in its insistence on the ‘ethics’ of witnessing, the reconstruction of the past in Shoah is done through verbal narratives, as Lanzmann interviews victims, perpetrators and collaborators in the spaces they used to and now live.[4] Its contemporary content was means to comment on, and criticize, the contemporary condition of commemoration.
Together with an impressive amount of scholarship since the new millennium has been more and more films that deal with and mirror trends in the historiography of memorialisation more broadly. In 2023 – a year in which the act and obligation of memory is apparently both more urgent and more existential – came Jonathon Glazer’s film, The Zone of Interest. The film takes at its subject Rudolf Höss, the SS commandment of Auschwitz who oversaw the murder of an estimated 1.1 million people, the vast majority of whom were Jews. Portraying this history with ‘intentional bad taste’, however, the film is a step backwards from an evolution of confident, conscious and sensitivity representations, that other artistry has shown.[5]
Striking is Glazer’s refusal to represent the Holocaust over the wall of Auschwitz; a self-conscious strategy that plays with intimacy, proximity and familiarity across temporalities. Living next to – knowing about – tragedy appears to be a timeless condition. In Holocaust cinema, representing indirectly has been done before. In Glazer’s rendition, the sounds of the camp interrupt scenes of domestic bliss, smoke reminding the viewer and – at least for some characters – that the ‘event’ is just next door. In this adjacency, the ‘sight’ of the film is kept separate to, but parallel with, its ‘sound’, almost representing two different films. By not showing, but always hearing, the camp, ‘witnessing’ becomes an overwhelming, sensual inevitability. No amount of roses can drown out the furnaces.
Personal happiness is sacrificed in the first scene, replaced with an ersatz insistence that a beautiful garden [tended by Jewish prisoners], fur-lined coats and diamonds [taken from deportees], and bucolic picnics, are worth the familial and moral tensions that play out inconsistently amongst the characters. But preferring stylised longshots means that the tensions of these characters are barely, briefly explored.
The film is a dramatization of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, of the Nazi regime running on an unthinking bureaucratic mind, coined around the Eichmann Trial (1961). Certainly, the euphemistic coding that Eichmann answered his interrogation with – replacing killing with ‘dispatching’, migration with ‘resettlement’ – informs the film, dialogue sacrificed to sounds of the camp, thereby avoiding any personal reflection on the brutality their lives depend on. But the problem with this presentation is that Höss did not have an unthinking mind: his membership in the party began in 1922 and was ‘promoted’ to Auschwitz having impressed his superiors in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. In preferring the problem of domestic adjacency over the real-life evil that Höss was responsible for, Glazer’s film fails both in representing the true horror of Auschwitz and in convincing us of the moral sacrifices made – or not made – by members of the Nazi elite. Although an important subject: the proximity of the Holocaust in topographical, psychological and material form with ‘ordinary’ life – the film ultimately fails to find meaning in that intimacy.
Header Image: The Zone of Interest : Film Poster.
[1] Christopher Browning in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 4.
[2] Nuit et Brouillard. Dir. Alain Resnais. Prod. Anatole Dauman. (1956)
[3] Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. (1985); Cited in Furman, ‘Viewing Memory’, p. 177.
[4] In Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 207-210.
[5] Peter Bradshaw. ‘The Zone of Interest Review – Jonathan Glazer Adapts Martin Amis’s Chilling Holocaust Drama’. The Guardian, 19 May 2023, sec. Film.
Doing History in Public 
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