The Zone of Interest (2023)
Seen at DCA on 04 Feb 2024, 12:30 pm; 15 Feb 2024, 8:15 pm
The Zone of Interest is a terrifying, suffocating film. Perhaps not instantly, and not if we’re looking only at the surface, which is the focal point of most of our film experiences. If an audience, frustrated about the rigidness of it all, leaves the theatre thinking that it’s about a high-ranking Nazi family living right next to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and the enormity of this situation, the takeaway is not wrong but unfortunately it means that much of the film’s power has slipped through the cracks. Jonathan Glazer is not merely upholding what decent human beings already know. He is building this awful space for us to look at, for us to look at ourselves in the present.
Now, of course, I’m not one to impose how a film must be seen. Believe me, I would hate being told how to read a piece of work. But in this particular case—like Meshes of the Afternoon, or Temptation Island, or The Double Life of Veronique, or Daisies, to name some popular examples—the film becomes something else if a specific lens is used, if we take a bit of time to step back and figure out which one it is. Banal as this may sound, there are films that demand us to reassess our basic understanding of cinematic language. Much of the brilliant scholarship in the field begins in these moments of reframing.
Once we put side by side our initial interpretation and this new discovery, we realise the stiffness of our viewing habits. As far as film reading is concerned, there are more skills to unlock, and more frames to see things through. Hence, when I saw The Zone of Interest again, in a packed late-night screening that was also its last day at the cinemas here, I couldn’t help but make a dramatic pronouncement as though I wasn’t already aware of it: I know nothing much about life. Thank you, Joni Mitchell.
Sound is also on the surface, but in film we think of sound in general as a logical component of the image. We think of sound (mostly speech, but also music and sound design) in a synchronous relationship with the visuals. Naturally when we watch a movie we focus on what we see. We make sense of the narrative by connecting the elements on the screen. Since film privileges the visual, sound is usually sought to validate what we see. The dog that keeps running around the house must be accompanied by the sound of its running and panting. After being informed that they have to leave their beautiful home, the wife’s seething resentment is captured by her words to the housemaid: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” We get it: the Nazis are evil. We regard sound as an element that should not come in the way of coherence and comprehension. Sound must enhance our connection with the narrative and visuals.
But that’s being extremely unfair to the art of sound, don’t you think? Sound studies, the depth of which deserves as much attention as the visuality of the screen, hardly get its due. One of the chapters in my PhD research is about examining the presence of sexual violence despite not seeing it. That we don’t see it, that it’s hidden from us, does not mean that the violence is not real or does not have any tangible consequences. Paying attention to the non-visual elements and to how they contribute to a deeper understanding of the work equips us with a better vocabulary for appraisal. If you think about it, even silent movies have sound. We would have a different film history if our culture gave more importance to it.
Seeing The Zone of Interest in this light—maybe a mistake, because I was very unsettled—has made this film about the past very much about the present. We do not see the brutal images of the Holocaust that we have been conditioned to expect. We see blood, but never the body. We see from the windows the smoke coming out of the crematorium. We realise that the wife’s mother left the house because she couldn’t sleep at night. We hear the Nazis talk about the plans for another gas chamber and congratulate themselves for “hitting their labour targets.” We hear the piano music with subtitles. We hear the gunshots, the pleas, the cries, the harrowing sounds of life taken away. But since we do not see them, our pre-conditioned senses do not afford them much thought. But they have always been present. This soundscape reveals a complete picture, if we only listen, if we only go beyond the limits of our sight. Sound highlights the active voice, the activeness of the voice.
This is not a spoiler at all. There’s a scene at the end where, all of a sudden, it cuts to the present. I find this the most frightening bit. Inside a huge building, the Nazi father climbs down the stairs and for some reason starts to vomit. He stops. We hear him retch. Is something really coming out of his mouth? We do not see it. It’s a long shot and we only see his back. Then it cuts to the Auschwitz museum being opened to the visitors. We hear the sound of cleaning equipment: hoovers, mostly. Staff wiping the surface, tidying the mirrors. We see the exhibit of materials owned by Holocaust victims. Then it cuts back to the man as he walks down the stairs and vomits again. Nothing is coming out. It makes you wonder: Which is the present, really? What do we mean when we say the past?
When I see this film again years later, I’m sure I will have a different set of questions and agonies.
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