In the most important filmography of the Shoah, Jonathan Glazer's The
Zone of Interest (2023) occupies a pre-eminent place... it is a work
that shows the ordinary horror of Nazi imagery and also consciousness
and unconsciousness of the impossible experienced as possible... it only
takes a minute to forget the slaughter of a people but, sometimes, a
film is needed to remember the eternity of a genocide which makes the
shame of Nazi totalitarianism even more shameful...
1943. The area of interest unfolds over the ordinary life of Rudolf FF
Höß (Höss), his wife Hedwig, their five children and the supporting
characters who meet in the so-called area of interest, about 25 miles
around the camp Auschwitz extermination. Höß's house is set against the
wall that divides them from the camp, dominated by chimneys that smoke
day and night... all you can hear are voices, dogs barking, shouts,
noises of trains and furnaces coming from beyond the wall... everyone is
blind and deaf to the obscenities that the Nazis are carrying out on the
erasure of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, madmen, disadvantaged, deformed,
dissidents, communists, anarchists... the Höß family spends their days
swimming, fishing, walking by the river... Hedwig takes care of the
garden and relations with the servants (Polish girls), other inmates
with striped dresses and yellow stars on their chests take care of the
heavy work. Mrs. Höß does not disdain wearing furs, jewels, cosmetics
that belonged to gassed people. The atmosphere is that which reigns in a
bourgeois family which pertains to the rituals of birthdays, good food,
relationships with the Nazi officials who deal with the "final solution"
of the Jewish question.
Commander Höß is an efficient person, faithful to the executioner's
profession... he boldly approves the project of a new crematorium oven
created by the award-winning company JA Topf & Söhne, specialized in gas
chambers... very active in the main extermination camps... their
incinerators- crematoria were patented by the Nazi state and after the
war the company was transformed into a state company and then into a
GmbH (limited liability company). The factories were subsequently
demolished and only the former administrative building remained, which
was opened to the public in 2011 as a memorial to Topf & Söhne's
responsibility for Jewish slaughter. It gives us some relief to know
that one of the Topf brothers (Ludwig) killed himself with the swastika
in his heart... when one is a Nazi at heart the only thing one takes to
heaven or hell (which is the same) is 'imbecility of believing in a
superior race dispensed by a greater imbecile, haloed by the German
people, Hitler... those infatuated with all totalitarianism belong to
the race of the defective and can only be taken into consideration when
they have been put to the sword. This is why we love lost dogs without
collars more than men wrapped up in faiths or ideologies.
During a canoe trip on the river with his children, Höß stops to fish
and his children play in the water... he sees the ashes of the Jews
advancing in the current... he has a moment of confusion, of worry... a
wash takes away the stench of the Jews and the course of things resumes
in complete normality... Hedwig's mother comes to visit her daughter and
grandchildren... she is astonished by the flames of the crematorium
visible from the girls' room and the garden... she leaves indignant at
the situation which her daughter defines as a paradise. Höß is promoted
to deputy inspector of concentration camps and will have to move to
Orianenburg, near Berlin. Hedwig and the children remain in the house in
Auschwitz.
Höß has a relationship with a political inmate (Eleonor Hodys) of the
camp... historians write that Höß's relationships with the inmate,
appropriations and cruelty towards prisoners, are the basis of his
removal from Auschwitz (?!)... to Berlin Höß shows his organizational
efficiency... the operation consists of ferrying over 800,000 Hungarian
Jews to various concentration camps, employing 20% of the prisoners in
forced labor and exterminating the rest. The success of this carnage
will be able to reunite him with his family.
Höß leaves his office in Berlin... as he goes down the stairs he is
attacked by retching but he is unable to vomit... the scenario
changes... we are in the present day... orderlies from the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum clean the environment of the gas
chambers, the crematorium ovens and the rooms where thousands of the
victims' personal objects are kept... we cut back to Höß who starts
walking down the stairs again, engulfed in the darkness.
The Zone of Interest is based on the novel of the same name by Martin
Amis (released by Einaudi in 2015)... Glazer writes the screenplay and
creates with an austere figurative beauty one of the strongest works
that have dealt with the themes of the Shoah. The photography of the
Polish Lukasz Zal, talented author of the images of Pawel Pawlikowski's
films, Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), gives the film an aesthetic
suggestion of a strong grasp of reality and at the same time embeds it
in an alienating sweetness. The editing by Jaroslaw Kaminski (Polish)
and the music by Mica Levi (British singer-songwriter and composer)
introduce the reading of the film between objective perception and the
introjection of tragic dissimulation... the details enter in the looks
and the sounds reverberate in the absurd metaphor of mass murder. The
measured, almost rarefied acting of Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höß) and
Christian Friedel (Rudolf Höß) infuses The Zone of Interest with the
impalpability of pain and at the same time the agony of a certainty that
makes the fields of shame even more shameful.
At the 2024 Oscars, Glazer, after receiving the award for best foreign
film, very emotional, with his hands shaking, reads a note: «Our film
shows where dehumanization in its worst form leads. We are here as
people who refuse to have their Jewishness and the Holocaust exploited
by an occupation that has brought so many innocent people into conflict
(...) Whether it is the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing
attack in Gaza, all victims of this dehumanization, how can we pretend
nothing happened?". The previous month the producer of The Zone of
Interest, James Wilson, during the BAFTA Film Awards, had said: «Those
walls are nothing new before, during or after the Holocaust. And it
seems clear right now that we should care about innocent people killed
in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people killed
in Mariupol or Israel." The Jewish shopkeepers of Hollywood are
indignant and anti-Semitism breaks out... no one can say that Israel
commits massacres in the casual style of the Nazis and Communists...
over a thousand Jews linked to the illusion factory sign a letter of
protest against the English Jew who it is permitted to say that the
inhumanity of all wars leads to the massacre of the innocence of entire
peoples.
It must be said. Wars are the product of the financial, military,
political, religious and cultural plans of the civilization of the
spectacle (and of state communism) and are the armed expression of the
dictatorship of mediocracy... the Empire of the commodity which aspires
to dominate the planet expresses a genealogy of fanaticism and is the
war machine of saprophytic capitalism that imposes its own rules. The
hatred that arises from religions, from Wall Street terrorism, from the
arms market chokes the truth violated by delocalization, colonization,
expropriation, oppression, exploitation, inequalities... and drives
murders, massacres, genocides... and it is the hatred that arms the hand
of criminals, dictators, tyrants, assassins who lodge in governments...
the area of interest is the degenerative grammar of the global market,
the necrophilic catechism of heads of state who decimate reason in favor
of despotism. For all this we have always instinctively been on the side
of the losers of every cause, even those lost from the start... we have
preferred justice to imposition... the tools to overthrow an overturned
world are all good, and in any case, without any remorse.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Zone of Interest (2023) occupies a pre-eminent place... it is a work
that shows the ordinary horror of Nazi imagery and also consciousness
and unconsciousness of the impossible experienced as possible... it only
takes a minute to forget the slaughter of a people but, sometimes, a
film is needed to remember the eternity of a genocide which makes the
shame of Nazi totalitarianism even more shameful...
1943. The area of interest unfolds over the ordinary life of Rudolf FF
Höß (Höss), his wife Hedwig, their five children and the supporting
characters who meet in the so-called area of interest, about 25 miles
around the camp Auschwitz extermination. Höß's house is set against the
wall that divides them from the camp, dominated by chimneys that smoke
day and night... all you can hear are voices, dogs barking, shouts,
noises of trains and furnaces coming from beyond the wall... everyone is
blind and deaf to the obscenities that the Nazis are carrying out on the
erasure of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, madmen, disadvantaged, deformed,
dissidents, communists, anarchists... the Höß family spends their days
swimming, fishing, walking by the river... Hedwig takes care of the
garden and relations with the servants (Polish girls), other inmates
with striped dresses and yellow stars on their chests take care of the
heavy work. Mrs. Höß does not disdain wearing furs, jewels, cosmetics
that belonged to gassed people. The atmosphere is that which reigns in a
bourgeois family which pertains to the rituals of birthdays, good food,
relationships with the Nazi officials who deal with the "final solution"
of the Jewish question.
Commander Höß is an efficient person, faithful to the executioner's
profession... he boldly approves the project of a new crematorium oven
created by the award-winning company JA Topf & Söhne, specialized in gas
chambers... very active in the main extermination camps... their
incinerators- crematoria were patented by the Nazi state and after the
war the company was transformed into a state company and then into a
GmbH (limited liability company). The factories were subsequently
demolished and only the former administrative building remained, which
was opened to the public in 2011 as a memorial to Topf & Söhne's
responsibility for Jewish slaughter. It gives us some relief to know
that one of the Topf brothers (Ludwig) killed himself with the swastika
in his heart... when one is a Nazi at heart the only thing one takes to
heaven or hell (which is the same) is 'imbecility of believing in a
superior race dispensed by a greater imbecile, haloed by the German
people, Hitler... those infatuated with all totalitarianism belong to
the race of the defective and can only be taken into consideration when
they have been put to the sword. This is why we love lost dogs without
collars more than men wrapped up in faiths or ideologies.
During a canoe trip on the river with his children, Höß stops to fish
and his children play in the water... he sees the ashes of the Jews
advancing in the current... he has a moment of confusion, of worry... a
wash takes away the stench of the Jews and the course of things resumes
in complete normality... Hedwig's mother comes to visit her daughter and
grandchildren... she is astonished by the flames of the crematorium
visible from the girls' room and the garden... she leaves indignant at
the situation which her daughter defines as a paradise. Höß is promoted
to deputy inspector of concentration camps and will have to move to
Orianenburg, near Berlin. Hedwig and the children remain in the house in
Auschwitz.
Höß has a relationship with a political inmate (Eleonor Hodys) of the
camp... historians write that Höß's relationships with the inmate,
appropriations and cruelty towards prisoners, are the basis of his
removal from Auschwitz (?!)... to Berlin Höß shows his organizational
efficiency... the operation consists of ferrying over 800,000 Hungarian
Jews to various concentration camps, employing 20% of the prisoners in
forced labor and exterminating the rest. The success of this carnage
will be able to reunite him with his family.
Höß leaves his office in Berlin... as he goes down the stairs he is
attacked by retching but he is unable to vomit... the scenario
changes... we are in the present day... orderlies from the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum clean the environment of the gas
chambers, the crematorium ovens and the rooms where thousands of the
victims' personal objects are kept... we cut back to Höß who starts
walking down the stairs again, engulfed in the darkness.
The Zone of Interest is based on the novel of the same name by Martin
Amis (released by Einaudi in 2015)... Glazer writes the screenplay and
creates with an austere figurative beauty one of the strongest works
that have dealt with the themes of the Shoah. The photography of the
Polish Lukasz Zal, talented author of the images of Pawel Pawlikowski's
films, Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), gives the film an aesthetic
suggestion of a strong grasp of reality and at the same time embeds it
in an alienating sweetness. The editing by Jaroslaw Kaminski (Polish)
and the music by Mica Levi (British singer-songwriter and composer)
introduce the reading of the film between objective perception and the
introjection of tragic dissimulation... the details enter in the looks
and the sounds reverberate in the absurd metaphor of mass murder. The
measured, almost rarefied acting of Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höß) and
Christian Friedel (Rudolf Höß) infuses The Zone of Interest with the
impalpability of pain and at the same time the agony of a certainty that
makes the fields of shame even more shameful.
At the 2024 Oscars, Glazer, after receiving the award for best foreign
film, very emotional, with his hands shaking, reads a note: «Our film
shows where dehumanization in its worst form leads. We are here as
people who refuse to have their Jewishness and the Holocaust exploited
by an occupation that has brought so many innocent people into conflict
(...) Whether it is the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing
attack in Gaza, all victims of this dehumanization, how can we pretend
nothing happened?". The previous month the producer of The Zone of
Interest, James Wilson, during the BAFTA Film Awards, had said: «Those
walls are nothing new before, during or after the Holocaust. And it
seems clear right now that we should care about innocent people killed
in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people killed
in Mariupol or Israel." The Jewish shopkeepers of Hollywood are
indignant and anti-Semitism breaks out... no one can say that Israel
commits massacres in the casual style of the Nazis and Communists...
over a thousand Jews linked to the illusion factory sign a letter of
protest against the English Jew who it is permitted to say that the
inhumanity of all wars leads to the massacre of the innocence of entire
peoples.
It must be said. Wars are the product of the financial, military,
political, religious and cultural plans of the civilization of the
spectacle (and of state communism) and are the armed expression of the
dictatorship of mediocracy... the Empire of the commodity which aspires
to dominate the planet expresses a genealogy of fanaticism and is the
war machine of saprophytic capitalism that imposes its own rules. The
hatred that arises from religions, from Wall Street terrorism, from the
arms market chokes the truth violated by delocalization, colonization,
expropriation, oppression, exploitation, inequalities... and drives
murders, massacres, genocides... and it is the hatred that arms the hand
of criminals, dictators, tyrants, assassins who lodge in governments...
the area of interest is the degenerative grammar of the global market,
the necrophilic catechism of heads of state who decimate reason in favor
of despotism. For all this we have always instinctively been on the side
of the losers of every cause, even those lost from the start... we have
preferred justice to imposition... the tools to overthrow an overturned
world are all good, and in any case, without any remorse.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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