The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer (dir)
USA / UK / Poland, 2023

I’ve come out of the DCA cinema today puzzled and frustrated. The Zone of Interest, a film about the Höss family living next to Auschwitz, is perhaps the least pleasurable of the screenings I’ve been to of late, even as it has also seemed the most necessary. For representations of the Holocaust have to surmount the sometimes insurmountable: how to represent a historical event that seems unimaginable, unbearable and incomprehensible in its horror and magnitude, a primal wounding as it were to our understanding of what it means to be human. This kind of wound never quite heals, is never quite ‘assimilated’, and its consequence and effects often necessitate a returning to that scene again and again. That ‘story of a wound’, Cathy Caruth remarks in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, is one of a crying out, ‘an attempt to tell of a reality that is not otherwise available’, a belated out-of-its-time ‘truth’  which ‘cannot be linked only to what is known, but also remains unknown’, ‘spoken in a language that is somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims our understanding.’ The Zone of Interest is all this and more in its naturalistic representation, a reaching out to deliver the everyday of those who were involved in or complicit with genocide, but in its unnaturalistic expressive ‘literary’ guise, is also a simultaneous recognition of the impossibility of that traumatic knowledge… and that catharsis won’t arrive for us in the darkened cinema. 

‘Zone of Interest’ in legal speak refers to ‘the range or category of interests that a statute or constitutional guarantee is intended to protect’; it also refers to ‘Interessengebeit’, the 40-square kilometre exclusion protected zone surrounding Auschwitz complex that was established to protect the public outside from the horrors of the camp. In this area, as the film depicts, SS camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his family live in a house of plenty that abuts the high walls, ringed with barbed wire, of the death camp that is Auschwitz. The homeliness of the house exists within spitting distance of the unhomeliness of Auschwitz; its gatehouse high tower, its brick barrack-style accommodation, and the smoking chimneys of the ovens where bodies are cremated are visible from the house even as the camp walls attempt a cordon sanitaire.

The Höss family have a bucolic life, and the film shows a large house and garden complete with outdoor pool and greenhouse where plants of all kinds are grown and nurtured carefully. Comfortable interiors, light and verdant spaces outside. The Höss family are also shown as enjoying themselves in pastoral settings: they swim in a river, lay on picnics, canoe on the water, have parties in the garden of their house where the sounds of birds and the flow of the water, laughter, and children enjoying themselves can all be heard. Inside the house, we see women working, maids cleaning, women gossiping in the kitchen, and the family having dinner together. The Höss boys play with their toys; the Höss girls read comments from the visitors’ guest book—these indicate how much pleasure was to be had in this rural cornucopia. Rudolf Höss reads fairy tales to his girls at bedtime in one a scene, the very picture of a loving father.

In terms of framing, these are very ordinary scenes of domesticity filmed almost fly-on-the wall naturalistically as if simply to document lives. The choral-like ensemble acting only gives way to individuals very occasionally when the narrative demands (for example the arrival of the mother, or Höss talking on the telephone about his plans for greater efficiency in the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz). No one in the family seems to have any sustained filmic close-ups that might have helped foster a connection between spectator and character, if that was indeed what was wanted. We neither  follow the husband nor wife nor child’s story except tangentially, and as and when the context of the activity on screen demands it. If we don’t really know much about what makes Rudolf Höss tick, nor understand Hedwig Höss except from the outside—that she is, for example, so narcissistically proud of the world of the house and garden that she has created that she refuses to move when her husband is posted elsewhere—we know even less about the servants in that household. Zilch. Lighting is not enhanced and scenes seem to be shot naturalistically rather than as a studio managed affair. The understated and unheightened effects make this film unfilmic in the ways we conventionally consume and take pleasure in cinema.  

Yet interrupting these scenes of ordinary domesticity are events and snatches of conversation that surely must make anyone sit up: the clothes of the dead Jewish women prisoners arrive in a laundry bundle and Hedwig rummages through the pile before inviting the women in the house to take a garment. Hedwig tries on an expensive-looking fur coat, looks at herself in the mirror (though no close-up is offered to enable us to read her from her facial expressions); she discovers a lipstick in one of the pockets, and tries it out on her lips (again, no close-up) before squirreling it away in her private dressing table drawer. One of the Höss boys turns over some teeth held in the palm of his hands in the privacy of his bed.

In such a scenario, when people do not reveal themselves (or are made to be silent in the case of the Jewish prisoners whom we don’t see), things seem to be endowed with a mute expressiveness. Things seem to signify more than what they appear to be, punching above their weight—no more so than the shock with which we must greet the inert, lifeless pile of shoes and objects that we see in the display gas chambers of the modern day Auschwitz museum towards the end of The Zone of Interest. Jews are talked of as things—to be destroyed or put to use in hard labour by the SS officers sitting around a grand polished wooden oval table. And yet, crucially I think, the bodies of the Höss family are also given this treatment cinematically; they are not glamourised, but depicted as unflatteringly pale and lumpen things. Hedwig’s mother seems to have a strange walk as does Hedwig herself, and Rudolf Höss, seen at times in his white vest and underwear, appears to be puffy, white and bloated, and not a picture of masculine health. Later, Höss is depicted as lying on a gurney, investigated for ill health, and we see him retching repeatedly near the end of the film on the grand staircase of an imposing classical German administrative building as he descends, footfall echoing into darkness.  The reality of the death camp if made invisible returns in other forms. 

Against the backdrop of everyday domesticity, disturbing sounds are heard in the distance: shouts, screams, someone hauled off and shot, and the every constant rumble of trains arriving at the camp. None of the family comments on these sounds; they seem to be just white noise that the Höss family no longer hear. Except that Hedwig’s mother who wakes in the night, peeks from behind the curtain of upstairs bedroom window, sees what is outside, and disappears the next morning apparently having packed her bags, leaving only a small note for her daughter to find which we, the audience, are not privy to. Except that the younger of the two Höss boys also draws his bedroom curtains back a little before letting them drop into place, shutting out the vision of the camp and the sounds of a prisoner being shot. Except that the Höss girl sleepwalks in the night, is found in odd spaces in the house and must be returned to bed. Except that the younger of the Höss boys is shut cruelly in the greenhouse by his older brother who taunts him with the sound of hissing gas. Except for Hedwig who threatens one of her servants with the chilling remark that she could have her husband spread the maid’s ashes on fields, and ashes of the camp cremations are shown spread on the plants in the garden in a later scene. And when Höss discovers body parts in the stream that he is fishing in, he hauls his two children from the river very abruptly and all of them are washed and scrubbed carefully.  

These little incidents seem to gesture towards another reality deliberately shielded from, protected against… seemingly sanitised in the constant round of cleaning and mopping that underwrites the rituals of domesticity in the Höss household. Cleaning, scrubbing, washing become a central spine of activity in the film as if in unconscious acknowledgement of the labour needed to keep everything pristine. White as a colour represents how the known is transformed into the wilfully unknown. Höss wears white clothes when he is not dressed in military uniform as an SS officer; white linen flaps in the wind in the garden; the family are dressed in white clothes at the summer party in the garden. And in one distinctive frame that focuses on Höss’ ruminations, a simple white screen with no image is held for as long as it takes for us to recognise the peculiarity of such blankness. The opening sequence includes a black screen held for what seems an eternity before the film cuts to a pastoral scene. Similarly, a red screen that occurs midway through the film seems to suggest something that can’t be signified explicitly… blood or killing? Moments of pure solid colour appearing on the screen bring to mind Laurence Sterne’s and also BS Johnson’s use of the black page to represent death in The Life and Death of Tristram Shandy and Travelling People respectively. These are but some of the unnaturalistic moments that represent something that exceeds representation, ‘spoken in a language that is somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims our understanding.’  

So against the predominantly naturalistic codes of The Zone of Interests are those that tilt deliberately in the opposite direction. If this is true of the solid colour screens—black, white and red—it is also there in the sequences where a young Polish girl collects apples and hides them for the starving Auschwitz prisoners who labour in the fields to discover. Her nighttime forays are like hollowed out photographic negatives (shot with, I read just now, a thermal heat imagining camera). The first time she appears, we hear the residue of the bedtime story of Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs trails in order to find their way home; the second time, the Grimms’ bedtime tale includes Hansel imprisoned, soon to be placed in the oven. This way of stitching the young Polish girl to that story seems to imbue her with an almost mythical or fabular function, though I read later that there was a girl in the Polish resistance whom the director met who did just such a thing. We see her two or three times, and in her final distribution of apples, the photographic negative morphs into a more realistic representation of the girl returning home on her bicycle. But the Polish girl is given no back story; she attains no heroic status, and her presence simply falls away. Yet that she is willing to help must ask of us, the audience, whether we might equally be willing to intervene, courting danger, if we are placed in a similar situation. These non-naturalistc segments are powerful contrapuntal moments, and to my mind crescendoes in the music that is played over the closing credits that sound like pent-up screams. Hysteria expressed in a darkened space.  

All of this has set me wondering at the puzzle that is The Zone of Interest, a film with no characters to empathise with, whose accretion of domestic life proceeds with no strong plot or narrative for the audience to latch onto, and which is portrayed with more or less with a scrupulous documentary naturalism. A film with its lens fixed on the perpetrators rather than the victims, and a film that withholds from us all of the usual pleasures of cinema (or subverts them). The Zone of Interest isn’t a pleasurable watch; it offers no stories of redemption, no easy stories of heroic resistance, outrage or monstrosity, no cathartic climax. No closure. Yet The Zone of Interest is startling, powerful and asks questions of us in discomforting ways. It’s perhaps nearer to Bertold Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’, for there Brecht wanted his audience not to escape into the make-believe world of the theatre but to attain a critical distance from it, so as to think and  reflect on what happened in history, precisely in order to change the world outside it. That is, of course, asking quite a lot from us. The Zone of Interest is the very opposite of the film I watched and fell in love with only a week earlier, All of Us Strangers, which uses all the affective pleasures of the cinematic experience to such good effect. Both films form an unlikely pair but both speak to our human capacity for love and connection, and our human capacity for wilful blindness and destruction.