The Zone of Interest is still an artistic consumption of the Holocaust

The Zone of Interest is still an artistic consumption of the Holocaust

on Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest

As a mysterious project that has been anticipated for a decade, the core concept of The Zone of Interest ends up being quite simple and clear: within the confines of the frame, it paints a serene picture of a family's life over a few days: children frolicking in a lake, the household's mistress meticulously planning her patio layout. Yet, beyond the frame, persistently echoing gunshots and screams signal that in a nearby concentration camp, the most brutal massacre in human history is being carried out methodically. The person in charge of this execution, a senior Nazi officer stationed at Auschwitz, is the head of the family mentioned earlier. The family’s residence and the Jewish concentration camp are so close -- the characters can even see the camp's roof from their yard -- creating a stark contrast in survival conditions and existential situations. The film intentionally shows one place while concealing the other, a choice laden with irony that underscores the profound disparities between two kinds of people.

Beyond the most obvious ironies, however, we can recognize in The Zone of Interest a frightening tension that arises from the inversion of the visible and the invisible. The officer's family and their living space, are absolutely visible; in fact, the gaze placed on them is almost like a kind of "surveillance": the digital wide-angle lenses encompass the entire space with the clarity and alertness of a scanner, leaving no corner untouched; and, as we see on the second night when the Nazi officer moves through rooms and corridors of the house, the film continually edits between different cameras in order that the character doesn't escape from the frame for even a second. From this point of view, we can say these cameras constitutes a surveillance system, which confirms the director Jonathan Glazer's approach: letting the characters perform autonomously on the set, while he and his photographer sit in the basement and silently record everything. The inversion happens here: the more pervasive the visibility, the more these spaces and characters lose their credibility, becoming disturbingly transparent like the purest of waters, triggering our instinctive and questioning -- what lies beneath these fine, tranquil appearances? And so, everything related to the Holocaust that had been intentionally pushed out of the frame, everything that was once invisible, reveals itself again through the marks and cracks they left on the visible surface - the sound of gunfire, the screams, the flaming chimneys, the Jewish laborers in the yard, the ashes flowing down the river. What is visible is no longer visible, what is absent is present again, and the evil breath of death seeps into the idyllic life like a shadowy specter, making all sweetness instantly horrifying.

So far, we have only made a literal explication of the core concept of The Zone of Interest; many would argue that the explication itself constitutes a defense of the film, but this is not the case. Every conscious auteur film attempts to construct its own concept, but what is the true utility of that concept? Once we ask this question, The Zone of Interest immediately reveals its inherent weakness: this inverted juxtaposition between the Nazi family home and the Jewish concentration camps is merely a creative idea, and the film doesn’t intend to reveal much more to us than complacently and repeatedly sell us on the idea. Also as a cinematic recreation of Auschwitz, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog uses juxtaposition too, with the overgrown site of the camp and the Holocaust's (visual or textual) archive being placed in a stream of sound and picture; similarly, James Benning's Landscape Suicide juxtaposes the interrogation of murderers with the landscape where the murders took place, and Wang Bing's Dead Souls juxtaposes the narratives of the survivors with the remains of the dead...... All of these films allow the otherwise silent ruins to speak their own histories through images, making the invisible visible -- this is the significance of documentary films as archaeology or evidence (rather than just media). In The Zone of Interest, however, the concentration camp is invisible not because it has been hidden and yet to be revealed, but because it is intentionally excluded from the frame beforehand; thus, its re-presence does not constitute a revelation of the truth, but is merely a trick that is only occasionally called upon as thrilling elements when the film needs to create tension.

It could even be argued that instead of revealing the truth, The Zone of Interest precisely capitalizes on the fact that the truth is well known: the idea of the inverted juxtaposition works because Nazi atrocities have become so "clichéd" in our time that even the film puts them completely outside the picture, the audience can still quickly enter into the habitual historical imagination through the déjà vus of those sets and situations. Obviously, this doesn't mean that we really know the truth about the Holocaust; it's just that we've watched too many related works: Schindler's List, The Pianist, and Life is Beautiful… to the extent that we've become accustomed to feeling indifferent to the Holocaust as a "movie theme". This is exactly the kind of "naturalism" that Serge Daney regarded as enemy: to film something as if it had already been filmed many times in the history of cinema; there is no longer exploration, discovery or revelation of the unknown, but only the lazy repetition of pre-existing formulaic images. The film industry hastily deals with what is really important by taking advantage of the audience's familiarity with the theme, while continue to look for newer, more "alternative" angles and styles to shock them. As a result, we see films like Son of Saul and The Zone of Interest.

In the end, what do we really see in this film? Between the visible (the Nazi officer’s family), which is intentionally transparent to the point of being empty, and the invisible (the Jewish concentration camps), which can only be filled with clichéd imagery, there is no concrete, dialectical connection, but only a monotonous layer of inversions and contrasts; the film touts this as a "stylistic experiment" of "authorial cinema", but the more it is labeled as such, the more it proves that its ultimate goal is simply to capture the audience with something horrifying. The Holocaust is of course horrific, but once the horror is transformed into a "cinematic experience" -- not to mention an exquisite, low-pressure, art-house cinematic experience -- then the horror would lose its warning effect and be reduced to a consumer attraction. If we agree with Godard's criticism that Schindler's List's Hollywood-style melodramatic recreation of the Holocaust is simply a self-delusional consumption of the history, then it is clear that The Zone of Interest, while seemingly the opposite of the former, is the other side of the same coin -- it’s just that Jonathan Glazer's way of consumption is more creative.

Toward the end of the film, Jonathan Glazer throws out his ultimate creative idea: suddenly, we are back at the present, and the doors of the Auschwitz Memorial are open in the morning, as janitors go about their routine cleaning; behind the glass windows are piles of soiled clothing from the victims of the Holocaust. Perhaps Jonathan Glazer believes that his film is a display of evidence of Nazi crimes as this memorial is, but in fact, it is more like a meticulously crafted haunted house, and viewers who delve into it certainly aren't expecting any kind of education, but rather are simply drawn in by its bright and eerie sets. Back at 2013, the audience of Under the Skin expected to see a horror film dotted with Scarlett Johansson's nudity, but instead were greeted with the moving story of how an inhuman machine gradually came to possess self-awareness; but now, the audience of The Zone of Interest get what they want: eerie images, innovative concepts, a few detestable Nazis, some gruesome hints about the Holocaust, and a creepy ending song. "This is astounding," they say, "this is art."

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