A grey screen and a penetrating immersive sound fill the room for quite some time. Stifled voices and machinery sounds mix into what feels like a void. The spectators don’t understand. It’s confusing. Is it a technical problem? No, it is the beginning of the journey. Director Jonathan Glazer, British of Jewish origins, together with sound designer and composer Mica Levi create a prelude, “a space for a calm reflection before meeting the Höss family”. It’s an invitation to the public to leave their busy lives for a moment and dive into someone else’s. It’s the starting point for time travel, which wants to avoid a comfortable demonization of Auschwitz. The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, competing in the Cannes 2023 official selection, exposes the everyday life of Rudolf Höss and his family in their “idyllic” house next to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz, on and off between 1940 and 1945. He was the SS officer who installed the crematorium and introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers. He was one of the figures behind the systematization of the extermination of the Jewish people. But he was also a husband and a father, Glazer seems to argue. On weekends he used to go canoeing in the lush countryside with his kids and at night in bed, before falling asleep, he chitchats with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) about future and past holidays.
The wall, separating this exemplary “national -socialist” family from the place where more than one million people perished, is Glazer’s zone of interest. For Glazer, the wall is the manifestation of how humans compartmentalize things in order to accept reality and justify it for themselves. Therefore, the core scene of the movie could not take place anywhere else other than Höss’ beautiful garden: In between the most magnificent colourful flowers, taken care of by the prisoners of the camp. And on the memory of one of this gardners, found in the archives during the preliminary research, Glazer builds up the main scene. During a pool party, Rudolf announces to his wife his imminent relocation to Oranienburg. Hedwig doesn’t want to go along. She claims she would never leave that amazing place: the house with its magnificent garden and swimming pool, the nature around, a life of privileges…this is all that they, or she, have been fighting for. She never mentions the smoke of the crematory ovens, the shootings, or the cry out of the prisoners. As if they never existed.
The topic of the Holocaust tapped on the director’s shoulder many years ago, without him being able to frame how to develop it cinematographically. Then something changed while spending a week visiting Auschwitz memorial museum, and after reading the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, on which the movie is loosely based. At that point, he understood he wanted to bring a new vision in the cinematography around Auschwitz. He wanted to depict it through a 21st-century lens, avoiding a period trope, and all the vintage flair. He achieved it by using sharp cameras, breaking the 180° view, and bringing in thermal photography to show night scenes. Everything on the set had to be true but brand new. The filming was done by multiple cameras at the same time. Between five and ten of them were placed around the house and controlled remotely, leading the DOP Łukasz ŻAL to define himself as a “multicameravision supervisor”.
The aim of the movie is to show how we all are capable of violence, Glazers admits at the press conference the day after the premiere. As Hanna Arendt exposed in The Banality of Evil, the SS were not monsters, it would be too easy to distance ourselves from all that brutality with this simple explanation. The Zone of Interest is not about the past, is about today, and every day.
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