The Zone of Interest

Read about it yourself – anything I say will not do it justice. For a sense of the depth of thought and preparation behind this film have a look at this from Wikipedia:

Glazer did not want the atrocities occurring inside the camp to be seen, only heard. He described the film’s sound as “the other film” and “arguably, the film”. To that end, sound designer Johnnie Burn compiled a 600-page document containing relevant events at Auschwitz, testimonies from witnesses, and a large map of the camp so that the distance and echoes of the sounds could be properly determined. He spent a year building a sound library before filming began, which included sounds of manufacturing machinery, crematoria, furnaces, boots, period-accurate gunfire and human sounds of pain. He continued building the library well into the shoot and post-production. Most of Mica Levi’s score went unused, as Glazer and Burn did not want to have the film “sweetened or dramatized” by it. The music Levi wrote for the prologue remained, as did soundscapes created for several sequences and a sound collage for the epilogue.

So it’s a kind of irony, a misdirection, making us see something by showing us something else. In Aidan Andrew Dun’s phrase, looking ‘to either side of what is seen’. And the purpose is to make us see the truth better through this misdirection; the film’s final scenes suggest that we have become immune to Holocaust-museumification, -heritagisation – so a new approach is needed. But the genius of the ending is that in those final shots Höss seems to be magically granted a vision of the future, of the stinking pile of evil which is his direct legacy. And he is physically ill at the sight, but then deliberately descends silently into the darkness to continue his work.

American Fiction

A very clever parody of white people’s attitudes to racial guilt. So it’s a film of ideas, particularly – in what I found the best scene – when three white literary judges end up voting down two Black judges, in favour of the spoof ‘Black’ novel written by our hero (who is secretly one of the judges). ‘It’s so important to listen to Black voices’ is the conclusion of one of the white judges. The hero’s back story is strong too, a narrative which nicely supports the primary intellectual element.

How they are related

Two ways of addressing racism, but so so different: one a comedy, one something quite new. And two different kinds of racism – in fact it seems wrong to call what happened at Auschwitz ‘just’ racism – again that was something new.