by Moises Barajas
In a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke criticized Stephen Spielberg’s depiction of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List. He expressed disgust at creating entertainment out of such an atrocity, pointing out the scene where Spielberg creates tension out of whether showerheads will dispense gas or water. But if the language of narrative cinema fails to depict the Holocaust, how can cinema depict it? Is it possible? With The Zone of Interest, Johnathon Glazer tackles these questions with a film that rejects drama, narrative, and cinematic convention.
The film follows a German family living in a nice house in the countryside. But what is peculiar about this family is that the patriarch is Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, the concentration their house borders. Glazer refuses to construct a narrative in his depiction of the Höss family. There is no plot, rather the film observes the family going about their day-to-day lives, in all its mundanity. This observational perspective is reflected in the film’s style as well.
Just as Glazer avoids narrating the Holocaust, he also refuses to depict it using traditional cinematic language. Almost all of the film is shot entirely in static wide shots that situate the subjects within their environment. The camera is a neutral observer of the lives of Rudolf Höss and his family. The film does not attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions through filmmaking. Instead, the emotion comes from within the observer and their own knowledge of the horrors occurring outside the frame.
Many interpret the film’s style as illustrating what historian Hannah Arendt described as the Banality of Evil. The concept, first articulated by Arendt in her writing on Adolf Eichmann, sees the Holocaust as being enabled not by hateful, passionate believers in Nazism, but by unremarkable, professionally motivated bureaucrats. People who are simply complacent and willing to do what is in their own best interest. This concept is certainly present in scenes like the one where Nazi officials meet to discuss the logistics of moving the Jewish population of Hungary into the various camps. They speak with the casualness one would use to discuss how to increase the efficiency of mail delivery routes. But viewing The Zone of Interest through this lens is reductive.
The film finds the evil in the banal. The lifestyle the Höss family leads is not dissimilar from how many in the Western world live. At first glance, this seems to fit with the interpretation of the films as a depiction of the Banality of Evil. Nazis are not unique monsters, but rather normal people who go along with the status quo for their benefit. But when Rudolf discusses with his wife, Hedwig, the possibility of leaving their rural home to live in the city she says something interesting. Upset at the prospect of losing the way of life they have always dreamed of, Hedwig tells him, “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do”. The line illuminates the film’s true thesis. It is not saying that people who live “normal” lives are capable of tolerating great evil, but rather that those “normal” lives are in themselves evil. The house in the countryside, with a big backyard, where a couple can raise a large family is a vision of life tied to white supremacy. And like the Höss family, many today and throughout history accept and perpetuate atrocities to attain this life. The Zone of Interest could just as easily take place in frontier America, or the West Bank.