Notes on 'Zone of Interest', by Adam Lehrer
Adam's thoughts on Jonathan Glazer's sensory annihilating Holocaust drama
1. Most of my art phag friends regard Jonathan Glazer as a visionary. A one-of-a-kind creator of cinematic worlds. A uniquely genius contemporary artist. I agree with all of this, but it’s also a bit strange to do so when I realize that Glazer has really only made four feature films — a cult oddity crime drama, a piece of shit failure that no one will ever convince me is good, and two infallible, mind blowing, utterly unique masterpieces — some shorts, and a few music videos.
I believe that if Under the Skin wasn’t as enjoyable a film to watch as it is, we’d likely not be thinking about Glazer at all. Sure, we like Sexy Beast with the particularly sinister Ben Kingsley performance and Ray Winstone sunburnt to a crisp. But Sexy Beast isn’t a mindblower, it’s just a good, rewatchable movie. Under the Skin, on the other hand, established Glazer as a special kind of filmmaker at the level of concept and technique. The film infamously used hidden cameras in a truck that was driven around by Scarlett Johanson as she attempted to pick up non-actor men on the side of the road. If the interaction led to something interesting, Glazer would offer the non-actor to be a part of the same film and recreate the encounter.
If this technique failed and Under the Skin was a shitty film, we’d regard such creative tactics as no more respectable than actors going so method that they’ll eat fucking glass to stay in character just so they can then talk about it during the Oscars campaign to follow. But Under the Skin is not shit. On the contrary, it’s fucking amazing and easily one of the best films and most unique art works, period, of the 2010s.
So, with that film Glazer set a standard for himself. He does not make films that take anything less than massive amounts of time, conceptual rigor, and technical advancement. This is the context we now understand the artist in as his Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest, is released. We go into his films expecting to see something we’ve never seen before. And I assure you: The Zone of Interest IS unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
2. One of the most unique aspects of The Zone of Interest is that, at least art historically, it’s not that unique at all. The film is essentially a work of vanitas. It is of the same structure as Cezanné's “Still Life with Skull”, Picasso’s “Black Jug and Skull” and countless other classics of art history. A vanitas is simply an image that evokes the transience and finitude of life and the certainty of death. A flower is life. A skull is death. You put them together, and you get a vanitas (note: I apologize to studied readers about this explainer, I have to assume that a wide berth of my audience is retarded).
The Zone of Interest is a vanitas painting transmogrified into its most massive, brutal, and haunting form. The film chooses to show Auschwitz commandante Rudolf Höss and his family living an idyllic and serene life — having picnics, swimming in rivers, intimate scenes between man wife — while using mostly auditory and occasional visual cues to perpetually remind the viewer of the supremely vile and macabre death being experienced by human beings on the other side of their backyard’s wall that lines the camps.
At one point, Höss is shown fishing in a stream while his children swim some small distance down. He then notices human remains — ears, appendages, and what have you — floating down the same river, and panics – the family’s tranquility interrupted by the despicable violence that it floats upon. An even more unnerving sequence depicts Höss’ wife Hedwig, arguably the film’s most irredeemably evil depiction, prancing around her room and admiring her form adorned in a new fur coat. It doesn’t take long for a viewer to understand that she’s wearing the coat of a pillaged and probably slaughtered jew.
Primarily, however, the DEATH of this vanitas sequence is evoked through sound. Indeed, the sound tells the other side of the story and completes the image. We experience two things at once. The tranquil and even boring images of a recently successful and upwardly mobile family. And then the screams, the gun shots, the hateful screeds of German SS, and the perpetual ever looming ventilation of the ovens. It is both the most boring and the most disturbing movie of all time. The image and sound of a film have not been so jarringly contradictory since Cornel Wilde set the rape scene in his 1970 post-apocalptic thriller No Blades of Grass to groovy, swingin’ London dance music. The difference of course is that Glazer’s contradiction is a deliberate one, executed with masterful precision.