‘Everything turns away’ – Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest

It is one of the most unsettling shots that I have ever encountered in a film. And, unsurprisingly, it stays with you. The camera, fixed and direct, frames a widescreen tableau showing almost the entirety of a garden. Our eye works out from the centre which is occupied by an ugly, rectangular concrete swimming pool. This odd and peculiarly unluxurious addition is served by an uninviting wooden slide and an awkward looking shower-pole. Crazy paving leads to and borders the swimming pool. On the surrounding green lawns, scattered randomly, are deckchairs, picnic blankets and hula-hoops. Children play, women look on, and a man in a white suit with a strikingly brutal short haircut - think a more athletic Kim Jong Un - strides around, arms folded and deep in thought. Around the edges of the garden, various flowers and shrubs grow. It is an ugly and jarringly geometric space. And even without the view of - or indeed a knowledge of the subject of Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest - the buildings that occupy the background, behind a concrete fence topped by barbed wire, we would still be left feeling a deep sense of unease. 

Et in Arcadia ego

Those buildings, though, unmistakably belong to a death camp. And the people enjoying this ‘carefree’ summer day are Auschwitz Camp Commandant Rudolph Höss and his family.     

It’s a remarkable piece of cinema. That said, there have been naysayers and those who find it flawed. Significantly so in the case of Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, who says that Glazer has made a ‘hollow, self-aggrandizing art film’. And then there’s the always erudite and engaging Richard Brody in The New Yorker who seems to wish that Glazer had made a different kind of film, finding in this work only an ‘extreme form of Holokitsch’.

But for me it is an essential and timely reminder of, not just where hatred and othering can lead, but how the horrific consequences and actions of that hatred, often take place adjacent to lives being led with ease and apparent unconcern. And whilst the film’s depiction of the domestic life of Rudolph Höss and his family is an extreme example of the propinquity of evil and indifference, Glazer’s provocations are necessary and factually valid. With every garden party, every swimming trip and picnic in a lush and bucolic meadow filled with birdsong – here I thought of the dangerous and sentimental untruth that birds don’t sing at Auschwitz – with every bedtime story, every meal taken, every birthday celebrated, the film always finds space for a dark and foreboding counterpoint reminding us of what is happening less than twenty metres away.

Whilst there is no violence or murder shown explicitly in the film, we are very aware of it. We hear it: from over the wall, the crack of gunfire, the barking of guard-dogs, the shouts of Nazis and the screams of victims are omnipresent and terrifying. We have visual hints: Höss leaving his jackboots on the veranda for a Jewish servant to clean, first running them under a tap, water mingling with blood and streaming away down the plughole. And we have the casual asides that tell of the brutal power dynamic. When Höss’s wife Hedwig, annoyed that her mother has stolen away in the middle of the night - perhaps unable to cope with the proximity of people that she knew being exterminated next door – finds that her Jewish housemaid has nevertheless set down two plates for breakfast, she softly delivers the most chilling remark in the film. “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”

Looking again, more closely at the image that I mentioned at the start of this piece, I couldn’t help but think of a famous painting and an ekphratic poem that comments on that work of art. Burrowing insistently into my head were Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. First the painting. Is it just me, or do the colour palettes of both film frame and painting share a strong similarity?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1560)

And them the poem. Auden’s timelessly wise words – which I’ve written about before – must always be quoted in full.

*

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
 
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

*

All great poems have the knack of slightly shifting perspective with each rereading. And after watching Glazer’s film, the poem’s kaleidoscopic keys tumble and twist, bringing the horrors of the death camp into devilish focus. Those who built and designed them, those who ran them, those who were murdered in them, and – appositely for this film – the day to day domestic existences of the families who lived right next door. Without wishing to be trite and overly prescriptive, the torturer’s horse takes on the guise of those children gambolling around the pool. That ‘dreadful martyrdom’ seems suddenly sullied - it’s happening and a million-fold. The ‘passionately’ hoped for ‘miraculous birth’ now seems pointless, cruel and horrific. And here the ploughman certainly hears the splash, and though, in his eyes – and there’s an added irony here in that after the war Höss and his wife Hedwig wanted to start a farm – it is far from a failure. Indeed, Icarus’s heroic overreaching becomes Höss’s evil success. His family – everyone in that garden – even the children – notice. And they all choose to look away.

Compare this shot of Höss with the framing of the garden image

Is that what sparks the title of the film? I’ve not read Martin Amis’s novel of which the film is based upon. But I seem to sense that it’s an instruction. That if we are to draw lessons here, our interest needs to be just as focused on those that are outside of the walls of the death camp. How is it possible that life manages to go on here when genocide is taking place next door? Perhaps then, it’s that literal concept of ‘next door’ that brings to mind Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s concept of good and evil and where the border lies:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

Nevertheless, the Soviet dissident still finds a startling place for optimism in his thought. After watching Glazer’s film that thought seems rather hard-pressed and, initially, the crack of light in his adage seems almost obscene. Solzhenitsyn is correct though – and the strange and powerful last ten minutes of the film – I won’t say too much in case it overdetermines a reaction - might well hint, albeit painfully, towards that. Indeed, without it it may well have been too overwhelming to keep it front of mind - a reaction that I encountered after watching László Nemes’ excoriating Son of Saul. That is not the case with The Zone of Interest. It is a stunning piece of cinema that, unlike Bruegel and Auden’s ‘expensive delicate ship’, doesn’t allow you ‘to sail calmly on’.