2024-01-18 22:36:23
Yes, as they say, a travelling It is a moral question, if each shot hides a position before the world and is a political decision, the question rises to an indecipherable dilemma when it comes to representing the unrepresentable. How is the horror of the crimes that the Nazis perpetrated in their concentration camps shown? How to tell the Holocaust? Is it moral to dramatize and reconstruct their deaths? Before this, the same example is always given, that of Claude Lanzmann, who in his masterpiece, Shoah, and in his speeches, he argued no. That that evil could only be told from the voice of the authentic victims.
David J. Skal, the great connoisseur of Gothic Hollywood who defended that horror films are serious things
However, Hollywood has typically cared little, if not at all, for Lanzmann’s opinion. Every year numerous works arrive that tell stories about the Holocaust. All told from the same point of view, that of the victims. It was Martin Amis who in his novel The area of interest everything turned. Suddenly a fiction was told from the executioners. The focus was not on his crimes, but on his passions and daily lives. A sentimental triangle with a concentration camp in the background. Perhaps that is why the novel was controversial and many of the author’s usual publishers decided not to publish it.
It was reading that novel that made director Jonathan Glazer decide to make a film about the Holocaust. He found a way to meet the challenge. The version of him ―which arrives this Friday in theaters― has little to do with the work of the writer ―who died hours before the film was presented in Cannes, where it won the second prize―, and yet it is the only adaptation possible. Glazer captures the essence of Amis’s book and manages to show the Holocaust in a way that cinema has never done before. There is not a single death. There is not a single gruesome scene in The area of interest. What there is is a portrait of the daily life of a Nazi family. A look at the banality of evil that is a punch in the stomach. A film to remember that becomes almost a physical experience. One comes out looking bad, as if one had lived with the Höss family for a month.
Glazer is clear that it was the most complicated project of his career, and that although on a narrative level the film bears little resemblance to Amis’ work, the adaptation credit had to be maintained, because without the book he would never have made it. “Martin Amis’ book showed me the way to do this project. It is the portrait of the perpetrator. The book was a work with fictional characters based on these real characters. I, through my own research, got into the same primary texts as him and started reading and researching and really thought these people were horribly common and boring. They are just our neighbors. We are. “They are driven by normal desires and impulses and by the search for a better life for themselves, a kind of rise in bourgeois status,” says Glazer, confirming that Amis saw the film before he died.
His intention was always to make a film that connected that with the present, that spoke about us, and “not make a museum piece.” “I wanted to make a modern film and use the subject to talk about now. I’ve done it to the best of my ability and I hope the viewer sees themselves on the screen and sees how similar we are to the perpetrator, which is terrifying to admit. I think it will take time for people to recognize it. I think even people will see it. They will feel it, but perhaps they will try to stay still, stay away from that recognition, but we have to recognize ourselves in the perpetrator,” he says of a film that is making strong noises ahead of the next Oscars.
Feel it without seeing it
The camera barely leaves the dream house of this Nazi family, but in the background you can hear the sound of guns, you can see the smoke from the crematorium ovens and you can almost smell it. A sensation that contrasts with what our eyes see, a woman cutting flowers, talking about her dream life while her children bathe in a pool. Only some leaks shot on a thermal camera make the viewer enter the field a little. A bet that was born from Glazer’s instinct, that he believed that it was not necessary to teach anything. “We have seen the archive of these atrocities in our school, in the cinema, in documentaries… so I think that we ourselves contribute those images to those sounds. Those atrocities perpetrated behind the wall are out of sight, but not out of mind. That’s why they were always present, but the characters had to be shown serving coffee or brushing their teeth. Seeing the banal actions of human life in contrast to that soundtrack,” he says and praises the sound work of Johnny Byrne and the music of Mica Levi (two of his frequent collaborators).
Of course he read and listened to what Lanzmann said before writing the script. “I am sensitive to the ethics of Holocaust representation. I’ve read a lot about it and I understand why there are people who say you shouldn’t do it and others who say you should. I think we should represent it and I think we should do it clearly, but at the same time I think that recreating that atrocity by showing skinny actors who are beaten and five minutes later they are having lunch behind the cameras… I couldn’t. I couldn’t direct a movie that way. I think you can’t approach the abyss of the horror of what happened like that and I couldn’t imagine recreating it,” he says about his aesthetic and ethical decision.
If you watch certain films about the Holocaust you feel almost pious. It is obvious that we are going to identify with the victims, but in doing so we remain safe
Jonathan Glazer — Filmmaker
Thus, it moves away from the classic narrative that cinema, almost always Hollywood, has chosen to portray it. He is clear that this way of telling has ended up becoming dangerous: “If you watch certain films on the subject you feel almost pious. It is obvious that we are going to identify with the victims, but in doing so we remain safe. We stay away from the possibility of becoming perpetrators or of being or having the same impulse as the perpetrators. That’s why it’s easy for us to make a great film about the Holocaust. There are them made by great filmmakers with all their art and with all their good intentions, but so we walk away feeling that that happened then and that it is not us. I feel that we have to show that it is us.”
To move away from this academic way of representing, he chose never to use artificial light, and that is why certain scenes are taken by thermal cameras. “I knew I didn’t want to use artificial lighting. Just normal light or the lamps that people would turn on at that moment. So, to shoot outside, in a concentration camp in 1940, I couldn’t suddenly put in a Hollywood light, so we opted for that tool. “It was a decision to do something visible and that for me also represents the opposite of his goodness.” A mysterious character who is based on a real person, one of the many girls who brought food to the fields. In fact, it’s her actual bike that appears, just like her dress or her backpack.
For Glazer, the important thing is to remember so as not to repeat, and that is why he believes he had to make this film: “We have to remind ourselves and others of the atrocities that we, as human beings, are capable of committing. It’s not about being German or Spanish or English or Brazilian or French, it’s a human condition. It’s a human problem. And we need it. “We need to confront our own capacity for violence and do it constantly, but it is very difficult for people to do so.”
This desire to bring the film to the present materializes in a shocking scene near the end, a look at the back of a dark hallway where Glazer speaks to the viewer about the present and opens new discussions about the museum use of the Holocaust or even the repetition of certain patterns. of exploitation. Glazer considers that Auschwitz “is an essential place”, since it is “the physical evidence of the atrocities that we are capable of committing” and that is what he also tries to make the film about it. In fact, for The area of interest spoke to the director of the Auschwitz State Museum who “is very aware and analyzes human passivity, how passive we are and how dangerous our passivity is and how being passive is a choice.”
Doing nothing is an incredible moral position, and that’s the problem for me. This is how these horrors grow. That’s in the air right now and it’s terrifying
Jonathan Glazer — Filmmaker
Glazer cites the English philosopher Jacqueline Rose and her work Women in Dark Times, where there was an essay about the truth and reconciliation committee in South Africa, which occurred in 1989, and where they put the victim and the perpetrator together in the same room. One woman wrote a letter asking the committee for amnesty for her crime, and when asked what it was she said: “Do nothing.” “That’s an incredible moral position, and that’s the problem for me, the fact that we don’t do anything. “That’s how these horrible horrors grow and that’s in the air right now and it’s terrifying.” The Höss family is still alive. He is the neighbor who does not help his neighbor, the man who looks the other way on the subway when he sees an attack and the one who laughs and thanks the abuser. Glazer has understood this and has created a masterpiece to wake us up before it’s too late.
#recognize #perpetrator