I'm still not quite sure what I think about The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust-not-Holocaust film about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig, and their five children, who lived within spitting distance of the camp, other than that it was certainly one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen. The Höss’s home shares a garden wall with one of the exterior walls of Auschwitz, barbed wire and all, and while this isn't strictly historically accurate, it’s close enough. The film isn't really about anything in particular, at least plotwise. We mostly see the daily goings on of the Höss family—cleaning, cooking, trying on clothes, swimming in their small backyard pool, admiring their flowers—while Rudolf Höss deals with the regular problems that arise with running Auschwitz, namely, figuring how to kill and cremate Jews faster. We never see the interior of Auschwitz, but we hear it throughout almost the entirety of the film. Screaming, yelling, gunshots, the official camp orchestras, the mechanical whir of industry, and we can see the smoke from the crematorium, turning the sky black during the day and red at night.
The critical consensus of The Zone of Interest has been positive, but it’s the negative reviews that interest me the most. Of the film, Richard Brody says in The New Yorker that “There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully; if he did, he’d have centered the movie strictly on Hedy’s and the children’s experiences and points of view, noting the hints and traces of the death camp in and near the house and amid the landscape…[and] shown Rudolf and his activities solely through their eyes, thus making their surmises and their doubts, or their willful indifferences, all the more conspicuous.”
I do, at least on an artistic level, think I agree with Brody, that had he restrained his focus even further, Glazer could have made a technically better film. But I also think that the narrative that the film would have offered would be weaker. That many Germans were able to live happy lives during the Holocaust, even alongside Auschwitz, is not surprising. We, in the United States, have lived for generations through wars where we are the aggressor. We know about Guantanamo Bay and yet we are still able to sleep at night. Our high standard of living is in part a result of the fact that our economy is fueled by these wars. While the exact circumstances are different, and the distance between ourselves and most of the people whose suffering we benefit from is greater, that people are able to adjust to the suffering of others isn't revelatory.
What is challenging about any film or work of literature about the Holocaust is the, at least presumed, necessity that it offer a lesson for its audience. Better to not look at the horror than to look and not learn anything at all. Though I feel unsure about the moral imperative this offers, it does strike me as a very Jewish conceit. Jews do not traditionally have open casket funerals, primarily out of a concern for respect for the dead. I think this understanding could serve the rest of the world as well, when we are in a period where images and videos such as those from Abu Ghraib and the death of Eric Garner are spread so easily on social media. It's been clear that these images accomplished little insofar as convicting those responsible with anything other than minor sentences or indicting anyone at all. Certainly these images have led to changes in cultural understandings of the military and the police, but it's unclear to me that actually seeing the image does much more to change people’s beliefs than the circumstances simply being described. In any case, it seems to me that without good reason, we could stand to avoid gazing at images of people undergoing experiences that strip them of their dignity.
While Susan Sontag later quarreled with some of her ideas presented in On Photography, I do in many respects agree that “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (14). It is purposeless to invoke a moral dictum that we should reduce the amount of images being produced and shared, I may as well shake my fist at a cloud. As Sontag questions herself in Regarding the Pain of Others, “What is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? … No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate” (108). But perhaps there are moments when we should know better than to look at those who cannot look back at us. The Zone of Interest, by refusing to show us these indignities directly, or even the inside of the extermination camp, engages directly with Jean Luc Godard’s famous reformulation of Luc Moullet’s comment, that “tracking shots are a question of morality,” by not offering us those tracking shots at all. It poses the question, as Libby Saxton puts it, “to what extent does aesthetic form, or style, determine ethical meaning?” (23).
What I think Glazer does accomplish by including Rudolf’s work activities in the purview of the film is commentary on something more than just the probable normalcy of family life alongside unspeakable horrors. Hannah Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil as she describes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, has been oft referenced in reviews of The Zone of Interest.. Though I find this reference boring (banal, if you’ll allow me) in the extreme, if only because of how frequently it is invoked, the point does stand. However, Arendt is principally interested in Eichmann himself, that it was his “sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period,” (287) and is primarily making the point that there is nothing particularly special or evil inherent to people who do evil things. The film represents Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig in particular, as too malevolent to stand in for the kind of thoughtless people Arendt is commenting on. Though I don't doubt Rudolf Höss in reality to have been in many ways as thoughtless and normal as anyone else, we don't see that here in such a way to make Arendt's precise argument to be of much interest to me. The film highlights both Hösses being expressly antisemitic and having a kind of maniacal enjoyment of killing people beyond the realm of normalcy. What is banal in Glazer’s representation is the sheer act of the “evil” itself, so banally represented as to hardly seem evil at all. Early in the film we see Rudolf meeting about a plan for a new crematorium that would allow for round the clock use. This conversation notably does not come across as particularly malevolent, it instead is discussed as simply a way to lessen the impact of cremation being a frustrating choke point in the endeavor of mass murder. Gassing large numbers of people is quick, it's disposing of their bodies that takes time.
I ultimately disagree with Brody’s assessment that Glazer should have kept the camera’s gaze only on Hedwig and the children, only within the confines of the mundanity of living a life alongside so much death. Because one of the most shocking things about the film to me was how well it demonstrates the mundanity of attempting to kill millions of people. There were moments during the film that gave me the impression that the Nazi’s approach to the mass murder of Jews was not only out of a desire to limit the distress of the einsatzgruppen, but almost as if it was the more humane approach to exterminating a people, just as one might approach an infestation of mice. I find this to be a more disturbing proposal than the alternative. Arendt, when she first published Eichmann in Jerusalem, was widely criticized for presenting Eichmann as more clown than murderous and self-aware antisemite, but I (and she herself) find this assessment far more terrifying. Not that the Nazis didn’t uniquely hate Jews, but that they didn’t necessarily revel in performing unspeakably evil acts. It doesn’t require a particular constitution to be capable of harming others, it only requires a desire to get the work done.
Glazer’s second criticism of The Zone of Interest is that “by gussying up such sequences as cinematic emergencies rather than as regular rounds like those of the rest of the film…[Glazer] suggests a lack of confidence that viewers will get the point from the drama alone—and a fear that his dramatic choices indeed risk diminishing those horrors. The filmmaker appears to want it both ways—to make subtle allusions that are given meaning by vehement jolts, to avoid specifics while pounding out generalized emotions.” This is in reference to moments in the film when Glazer fades out to a black, a red, and a white screen, accompanied by additions to the soundtrack that take us out of the framing of the film to remind us that we should be horrified. Perhaps these scenes are a result of Glazer’s lack of confidence in the audience (or his lack of confidence in himself) but this didn't feel to me, as Manohla Dargis put it in The New York Times, an attempt to “announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition,” making the film nothing but a, “hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise.”
While “remember,” “never forget,” and “never again,” are terms that are frequently invoked and central to any discussion about the Holocaust, Jack Halberstam notes in The Queer Art of Failure, that “forgetting also occupies a central position in Holocaust studies.”
The phrase “Never forget,” which serves as a moral imperative for all knowledge work on the Holocaust, tends to obliterate the complex web of relations between memory and forgetting that actually function in Holocaust memoirs. Anyone who has ever been around a survivor of the Holocaust will easily recognize the kind of active forgetting practiced by many survivors. Claude Lanzman’s film Shoah (1985) is perhaps the most nuanced representation of a forgetting that is not a denial. His film is punctuated with pauses and silences, interrupted narratives and broken memories; people begin to tell and then break off, they start to speak and then fall back on gestures. Complicit Polish witnesses of the Shoah as well as former concentration camp victims all engage in this form of narrative and unwrite as much as they write of the story of destruction. (84)
We have to forget—how can you not? Many fear talking about the Holocaust with children, but I am grateful for having had an early education on the Holocaust, because though I could engage with it extensively in childhood, I can no longer think or reckon with the Holocaust very much anymore. In reading Roger Ebert's review of the 1989 Heathers for a post I am trying to write (no promises) about the new Mean Girls movie musical, I was struck by his note that “adulthood could be defined as the process of learning to be shocked by things that do not shock teenagers.” For all that I think the injunction to “never forget” is necessary and valuable, I myself forget about the Holocaust, in all ways other than the fact of the matter that it happened, every day. How else would I ever be able to do anything at all?
While I do think the film could have done without its more stylistic elements, they do not come across to me as a self-aggrandizing mediation on the horrors Glazer isn’t showing us directly. I get the sense that Glazer is forcing us to look away rather than to look more deeply, because these moments do the work of blowing some of the air out of the vents that has been building rather than helping to build it up any more. Glazer simply doesn't seem able or willing to fully sit with the film he is trying to make, and for good reason. He needs to remember and yet not remember, to show us the horror without showing us the horror, forget without forgetting. Libby Saxton elucidates further in her essay “‘Tracking shots are a question of morality:’ Ethics, aesthetics, documentary,” that “Kant’s proposition that we derive pleasure and moral insight only from the form of an object, rather than the content it expresses, resonates with the film critics’ ascription of moral meaning to mise-en-scène. Yet, read in context, Godard’s remark implies that the morality of technique is determined by its relation to the subject-matter…Godard’s views on the morality of form are informed by a conviction that it is unethical to aestheticize atrocities such as the Holocaust” (26). Glazer’s screen fade outs accomplish this morality by standing in as definitively anti-aestheticizing. He refuses the victims the indignities of a tracking shot, and instead engages with his own inability to fully hold or remember the reality of the Holocaust.
The other primary criticism I've seen of the film is its length, though at just under 1 hour and 50 minutes, it's shorter than almost every other film I've seen in recent months. It's true that not much happens over the course of the film, and I have been guilty of claiming that films such as these—based on a concept rather than a story—should know when to keep things short. But I think the most convincing argument for its length is that the film is as experiential as it is conceptual. At the start of the film, you cannot possibly understand how the Höss family isn't bothered, even on a sensory level, by the ever present sounds of death surrounding them, but you might just understand by the end of it. You might just stop noticing the sounds too. It's the only way I could stand to sit through the whole film.
Otherwise, the film is essentially a simplistic family drama. Rudolf is told that he is being transferred to Oranienburg to serve as the deputy inspector of all concentration camps, much to Hedwig’s dismay. She loves their home and the life that they have made there and so she begs and is ultimately allowed to stay there with their children for the duration of Rudolf’s assignment. Rudolf is eventually transferred back to Auschwitz, to oversee the logistical nightmare of exterminating some 700,000 Hungarian Jews. And this brings us to the moment in the film that I both found to be the most emotionally resonant and confounding, when Höss leaves a party celebrating the plan for the Hungarian Jews, dubbed “Operation Höss.” He descends a flight of stairs and then pauses on the landing, retches without vomiting, descends another flight, retches again, and then continues down the steps, into an unseen darkness.
This scene is a callback to Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 quasi documentary, The Act of Killing,, in which he films some of the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 of approximately one million people who were executed primarily by paramilitary groups and gangsters. Oppenheimer in turn interviews them and has them reenact some of the murders they committed. The documentary focuses on one man in particular, Anwar Congo, who over the course of the film goes from dancing and singing just after demonstrating the way he used to murder people—by strangling them with a wire so as to reduce any blood cleanup—to shaking and retching when reflecting on the harm he once caused people.
Later, Oppenheimer shared in an interview that after having watched the documentary, Congo expressed to him that “there is nothing left for me to do in life but die.”
From The Act of Killing, warning 6:00-9:00 for sensitivity to vomiting
The thing that I have repeatedly gone back to since Israel launched its war on Gaza is the book of Jonah, which for reasons I can't quite explain, I feel that I finally am able to understand, and understand why we read it on Yom Kippur, in the wake of this war. Jonah escapes the stomach of the giant fish and resignedly goes to Nineveh to tell them of God’s plan to punish them and then watches with dismay as they repent and are saved from God’s wrath. “Better that I should die than live!” (4:3) Jonah exclaims in response to this, an astonishing statement from a prophet who accomplished what few other prophets have been able to: succeed in getting people not only to believe his prophecy, but also to repent. I say this without any impulse toward suicide, but Jonah's words have echoed in my head endlessly over the last few months as I have watched my fellow Jews be filled with bloodlust and emptied of compassion. What does it mean to be a Jew in all of this? Better that I should die than live.
In 2014 I attended a presentation given by Karen Bray at Eugene Lang College where she engaged in a kind of hermeneutics of the book of Jonah by putting it in conversation with Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam principally engages with children’s cartoons and queer performance art in order to answer the question, “What kinds of reward can failure offer us?” (3). Bray uses Halberstam’s discussion of Babs, a chicken in the 2000 animated film Chicken Run, who, in response to Ginger’s revolutionary call to action, “We either die free chickens, or we die trying,” asks, “Are those the only choices?” For Halberstam, this represents a feminist refusal of “the choices as offered—freedom in liberal terms or death—in order to think about a shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak in the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing” (129). Bray recasts Jonah in this light, as a refusenik. Nineveh’s wickedness was perhaps not only an affront to God, but also to Jonah as well, who neither wants to see them saved, nor see their total destruction. “By running away…Jonah never actively seeks to condemn Nineveh; instead he rejects the position of condemner and that of savior” (Bray). He is a conscientious objector in both regards.
I was very struck by this interpretation in 2014 and it still resonates with me today. “Better that I should die than live,” is his expression of refusal. And I would like to join in. I too refuse! I want no part in this nationalist project, I refuse to let it speak for me. But by pulling this thread further, when God addresses Jonah and says “should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?” (4:11), he is also addressing Jonah's indignant position as a refuser, and says “you don't get to refuse!” Halberstam's playfulness with Chicken Rum is fun and interesting to me, and Bray’s interpretation of Jonah is resonant, but I ultimately disagree that this offers a real ethical philosophy. You do in fact have a personal responsibility to yourself and others and you either follow through with them or not and yes, those are the only choices! Stop wallowing under your dead tree and stand up!
Much has been said comparing The Zone of Interest to the contemporary moment, as far as living life as normal while thousands of people are being killed, but I feel fairly ambivalent about this. The implication of comparing the actions of Israel to the Holocaust has always seemed to me to be a kind of attempt at scolding Jews for not learning the right lessons from the Holocaust. And even though I myself have occasionally felt this way about fellow Jews, it also seems obvious enough that there aren't any good lessons to be learned from being the victims of a genocide and even if there were, the Holocaust would be a poor way of teaching them.
I don't have much to say about the ongoing war in Gaza that hasn't already been said, but I'll get on my soapbox for just one moment. There’s been a lot of hay made on whether or not what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, but this hysterical need on the part of many to play word games about definitions of genocide in order to explain it away is nothing more than a desperate attempt to deny what everyone already knows, or at least what every Jew who has listened to anything Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have said know, which is that Israel has genocidal intent and has repeatedly expressed this. The fact that Israel and many of its supporters have made the claim that all the bloodshed and mass displacement are really about destroying Hamas is neither here nor there. It has been only 3 years since the US officially withdrew from Afghanistan after a 20 year war to destroy the Taliban that accomplished what, exactly? Bloodshed and mass displacement? Certainly not the destruction of the Taliban. There's nothing that breeds radicalism quite like desperate circumstances. And in any case, Israel could never stand to exist as it currently does, with an expressed state policy supporting the continued expansion of illegal settlements, with Gaza inhabited by Palestinians and controlled by anything other than Hamas. Israel certainly is not interested in negotiating with a unified Palestine under Fatah, and without Hamas to act as a straw man, how else could anyone justify the endless march toward further displacing and denigrating Palestinians? How else could anyone justify their invocation of Golda Meir’s words, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us?” I fear that we are telling on ourselves.
If Israel continues down this path, then I think in all likelihood we will see new Jewish settlements be built in Gaza, atop where rubble and corpses lie now (chas v’shalom, chas v’shalom, may God please come and save us all!). No houses will share the wall that encloses Gaza because that wall will no longer exist. There won't be any sounds to get used to. Israel may well accomplish its goal, not of destroying Hamas, but of clearing Gaza from all Palestinian life. And I am not by any means trying to imply that what is currently happening in Gaza is equivalent to the Holocaust. I do in fact think that the memory of the Holocaust is so important because so few comparable things—the mass industrial style extermination of a people, and in particular, through the use of death camps—have happened on this earth. But the most important difference between these events is the simplest one: the war in Gaza is happening right now.
I suppose whether or not you justify what is happening is your prerogative, but let's not pretend we don't know what the realities are. Adi Zulkadry, one of Anwar Congo’s friends and fellow mass murderer who appears alongside him in The Act of Killing, is much more defensive than Congo about his crimes. “‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. So I can make my own definition,” he says. But his ambivalence on this point is one of the most interesting things highlighted in the documentary. He simultaneously makes overtures expressing pride and justification for what he did, but he does not deny the violence of it, does not attempt to claim that the communists (or suspected communists) he executed were deserving of it because they were “cruel.” He knows that it was he who was cruel and is aware that the documentary will make his cruelty publicly known. When Soaduon Siregar, a journalist who worked in the office where they conducted many of the executions, jokes about how impressive it was that they were so smooth in their approach to killing people, that even he didn’t know about it, Zulkadry turns to him indignant. Of course you knew! “How could [you] not know? Even the neighbors knew! Hundreds were killed. It was an open secret.”
From The Act of Killing
The final scene of The Zone of Interest, where Höss retches as he descends down the stairs into the darkness, is cut by a scene that takes us out of the historical drama of the film and into the view of a silent documentary. We see workers in the modern day, real people who work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum going about their regular working duties as cleaners. They clean the crematorium, they clean the glass enclosing piles of shoes, they vacuum the floor. It isn't entirely clear to me what Glazer is getting at with this extended sequence. Is he commenting on how anyone can get used to the presence of evil? That even when doing the work of preserving history for noble purposes, the evidence of the sheer magnitude of the crimes will eventually also become background noise? Is this really Glazer retching, unable to sit fully with the film he has made or reacting in himself to what he describes as “the capacity for violence that we all have?” By not looking directly at the horrors of the Holocaust, the film is an indictment of the act of looking away, but it seems to be saying here that everything, even the past, will eventually look back at you.
The horrifying images we have seen from Gaza are notable in part because unlike most other war photography, these videos and pictures are taken and posted online by Gazans themselves, in an effort to document and show the world the truth of the violence and dehumanization they are experiencing. By demanding that we don't look away, these are images that manage to transcend the medium of video and photography so when we look at them they look back.
I remember…I said, ‘Get out of the car.’ He asked, ‘Where are you taking me?’ Soon, he refused to keep walking, so I kicked him as hard as I could in the stomach. I saw Roshiman bringing me a machete. Spontaneously, I walked over to him and cut his head off. My friends didn’t want to look. They ran back to the car and I heard this sound [makes gargling sound]. His body had fallen down and the eyes in his head were still…[looks with wide eyes]...On the way home, I kept thinking, why didn’t I close his eyes?
This is how Anwar Congo describes the event that haunts him more than any other murder he committed and later becomes the most gruesome reenactment in The Act of Killing. In it, Congo stands in for a man who he brutally decapitated. His face is framed so it appears unattached from his body, covered in fake blood, while a manikin nearby offers us a desecrated corpse. “That is the source of all my nightmares…I'm always gazed at by those eyes that didn't close,” he says. When they film a version of this nightmare, his friend, Herman Koto, directs him, “Just get up, surprised, and ask ‘why are you alive?’ What’s so hard about it?” But there is something hard about it for Congo, who seems to know exactly why the vision in his nightmare is alive. Instead he points with a shaking finger and says, “I thought I killed you.”
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The Viking Press, 1963.
Bray, Karen. “Failing to Get It: Feminist Chickens, a Hebrew Asparagus, and a Halberstamian Political Theology.” The Other Journal. https://theotherjournal.com/2015/07/failing-to-get-it-feminist-chickens-a-hebrew-asparagus-and-a-halberstamian-political-theology/
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
Saxton, Libby. “‘Tracking shots are a question of morality:’ Ethics, aesthetics, documentary.” Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton. Routledge, 2010.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977.
---. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.
woof! this was ambitious (so many intertexts!). appreciated the way you brought in the act of killing, which really fucked me up when i watched it in 2013ish. do you want to borrow evil men (dawes)?
and !!
"this hysterical need on the part of many to play word games about definitions of genocide in order to explain it away is nothing more than a desperate attempt to deny what everyone already knows"