Thanks so much for this, Garth - I saw the film last night and yours is the first piece of writing I've engaged with (I'll read the other reviews shortly - I didn't want anyone else in my head when I watched). I agree with so much here, and I have been thinking about the film nonstop (it haunted my dreams), especially in relation to Palestine (to that age-old question, "What would we do if we lived during the Holocaust?" - well, whatever we are doing right now, in relation to the genocide in Gaza). Like you, I have been trying to make sense of the scenes in present-day Auschwitz and I haven't landed anywhere that feels right. But this summer I read "The Memory Monster" by Yishai Sarid (an epistolary novel written as a single letter of apology by a scholar of Holocaust studies, who is employed to give tours of the camps to Israeli students). The novel (which I highly recommend - I read it in one sitting) shows how the protagonist's obsession bleeds into admiration and presents a critique of memorialization and how close it comes to glorification. So as I watched, and in the hours since, I wondered if the scenes of banal preparation in these spaces of horror-as-museum/memorial in the present are trying to mirror (or connect a thread to) life on the periphery of the camps/the glorification of their planning and construction, in the past. The memorialization of the camps now would, if I'm reading this link correctly, continue the work of the death camps, not disrupt it or show how the good guy wins. And so we never truly escape this loop of glorification. If so, I don't know if the film was successful, per se, but it's the only explanation I have landed on with any confidence.
One of the best essays I've read on the film and eloquently well written, Garth. This film is one of my favorite films of 2023, even though I saw it last month, it was worth the wait to watch it in theaters.
To answer your question on the girl on the piano, the girl on the piano is Alexandria who is the same girl who hide the apples for the prisoners and is the one who finds the tin with the music that contains Joseph Wulf's Sunbeams.
Alexandria is based on Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Polish woman who survived the war that Jonathan Glazer met during the making of the film, she was 90 years old. Before her passing in 2017, Alexandria told Glazer that when she was 12 years old and joined a Polish resistance movement called AK where she would hide apples for the prisoners as she cycled the camps. Because she was a child, she was less likely to be suspected. The bike and dress worn by the actress is owned from Alexandria herself.
If you're interested about my thoughts on the film, here is my review of it on Letterboxd.
Incredible essay - you gave me so much to think about having just seen this film, as I actively digest it. The museum sequence surprised me and I was initially disappointed at being forcefully removed from the story I had been sitting in for the past 80 or so minutes. I then had a recognition of what I thought was the point of it (but now realize I was wrong) — While the sequence makes it clear we are still at Auschwitz in Poland, just that it’s now modern day, my initial reaction zeroed in on the act of the janitorial work itself. Low wage labor intensive jobs are often held by members of the immigrant population. The events of the past 8 years and Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric, in which he has explicitly used the word “camps” in banter about planned immigration reform are so at top of mind that when I saw the images of janitorial staff cleaning the remains of a concentration camp it struck me as a vivid and almost rabid, warning.
I haven't yet watched this film, but now I really want to see it. Beautiful, engaging writing. And "what’s most important for our moral health is to acknowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan—it looks likelier all the time—none of us can know what we would do. The posture of righteousness seems to me not only morally bankrupt but dangerous. None of us has any idea what we would do in extremis, whether we would pass a test we haven’t faced" rings particularly true.
You’ve brought Jack Halberstam’s “The Killer in You is the Killer in Me” running to the forefront of my mind. Therein Halberstam implies that the “tyranny of selfhood” encourages an ardent “glorification of one’s understanding of the political.” Such a glorious tyranny leads to a glorious praxis: fly high above reproach, embrace self-fashioning, and resist self-shattering’s villainy—or, else. Halberstam, ever committed to failure as a means of survival, offers a queer alternative to said tyranny: “resist mastery,” “privilege the naive or nonsensical (stupidity),” and lastly “suspect memorialization.” I am tickled by the first two and enchanted by the third. As a ritual of power, Foucault might say, memorialization takes history and its messiness, wields a broom, and sweeps the record right up. What’s left? Tidy histories of triumph—Halberstam’s phrase, not mine. Gathering Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Saidiya Hartman’s Loses of Power, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters together, they make a rather compelling argument: to suspect and resist memorialization, indulge, if not privilege, certain forms of erasure, namely, forgetting. The act of forgetting, they purport, resists “the heroic and grand logics of recall” and releases different forms of memory, forms that adhere to radial arrangements instead of linear specters. Does Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest forget in a queer manner? Yes, I think so. By shifting its attention from the racial object to the racist subject (a Morrisonian move for sure), the film implores omission (and what is omission if not strategic forgetting?) as its predicate and implicates its viewers saying, like Halberstam and funnily enough the Smashing Pumpkins, “the killer in you is the killer in me” and that let’s no one off the hook. Great essay and great film!
Wow. I have yet to see the film but am so grateful for this extremely intelligent, thoughtful essay, which has left an impression on me in terms of how to attend to what I will be seeing on the screen. Thank you!
Wow! I will reread the review after reading the book, seeing the movie - probably twice. I will also copy this essay as a writing lesson. Vigorous use of language is deeply admired.
Thank you for the point about the sequence at the end of the film, I agree that it's a strange choice, and that the film here seems to lose its nerve. I think it would have been better simply to show Höss retching, as though viscerally trying to reject something unnameable, and then continuing down the stairs.
While taking a break from reading “The Counterfeit Countess” by White and Sliwa, I became engrossed in this self-reflection essay on the Holocaust horrors. Memorialization is necessary and yet can only be honestly produced by those who were there or are directly affected by the original events. The facts, objects, places of evil can only create “spaces” of learning, of history-making, of so-called understanding of what really happened. And yet this essay, the film, other such honest writings, art, and research are so necessary for us to finally “get it” - if that is possible. Thank you, for this essay.
I saw the film for the first time Friday night and have been thinking about it all weekend. This is exactly the analysis I needed to put my thoughts and feelings about it in order. Thank you
Thanks so much for this, Garth - I saw the film last night and yours is the first piece of writing I've engaged with (I'll read the other reviews shortly - I didn't want anyone else in my head when I watched). I agree with so much here, and I have been thinking about the film nonstop (it haunted my dreams), especially in relation to Palestine (to that age-old question, "What would we do if we lived during the Holocaust?" - well, whatever we are doing right now, in relation to the genocide in Gaza). Like you, I have been trying to make sense of the scenes in present-day Auschwitz and I haven't landed anywhere that feels right. But this summer I read "The Memory Monster" by Yishai Sarid (an epistolary novel written as a single letter of apology by a scholar of Holocaust studies, who is employed to give tours of the camps to Israeli students). The novel (which I highly recommend - I read it in one sitting) shows how the protagonist's obsession bleeds into admiration and presents a critique of memorialization and how close it comes to glorification. So as I watched, and in the hours since, I wondered if the scenes of banal preparation in these spaces of horror-as-museum/memorial in the present are trying to mirror (or connect a thread to) life on the periphery of the camps/the glorification of their planning and construction, in the past. The memorialization of the camps now would, if I'm reading this link correctly, continue the work of the death camps, not disrupt it or show how the good guy wins. And so we never truly escape this loop of glorification. If so, I don't know if the film was successful, per se, but it's the only explanation I have landed on with any confidence.
One of the best essays I've read on the film and eloquently well written, Garth. This film is one of my favorite films of 2023, even though I saw it last month, it was worth the wait to watch it in theaters.
To answer your question on the girl on the piano, the girl on the piano is Alexandria who is the same girl who hide the apples for the prisoners and is the one who finds the tin with the music that contains Joseph Wulf's Sunbeams.
Alexandria is based on Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Polish woman who survived the war that Jonathan Glazer met during the making of the film, she was 90 years old. Before her passing in 2017, Alexandria told Glazer that when she was 12 years old and joined a Polish resistance movement called AK where she would hide apples for the prisoners as she cycled the camps. Because she was a child, she was less likely to be suspected. The bike and dress worn by the actress is owned from Alexandria herself.
If you're interested about my thoughts on the film, here is my review of it on Letterboxd.
https://letterboxd.com/whovian45810/film/the-zone-of-interest/
Incredible essay - you gave me so much to think about having just seen this film, as I actively digest it. The museum sequence surprised me and I was initially disappointed at being forcefully removed from the story I had been sitting in for the past 80 or so minutes. I then had a recognition of what I thought was the point of it (but now realize I was wrong) — While the sequence makes it clear we are still at Auschwitz in Poland, just that it’s now modern day, my initial reaction zeroed in on the act of the janitorial work itself. Low wage labor intensive jobs are often held by members of the immigrant population. The events of the past 8 years and Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric, in which he has explicitly used the word “camps” in banter about planned immigration reform are so at top of mind that when I saw the images of janitorial staff cleaning the remains of a concentration camp it struck me as a vivid and almost rabid, warning.
I haven't yet watched this film, but now I really want to see it. Beautiful, engaging writing. And "what’s most important for our moral health is to acknowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan—it looks likelier all the time—none of us can know what we would do. The posture of righteousness seems to me not only morally bankrupt but dangerous. None of us has any idea what we would do in extremis, whether we would pass a test we haven’t faced" rings particularly true.
You’ve brought Jack Halberstam’s “The Killer in You is the Killer in Me” running to the forefront of my mind. Therein Halberstam implies that the “tyranny of selfhood” encourages an ardent “glorification of one’s understanding of the political.” Such a glorious tyranny leads to a glorious praxis: fly high above reproach, embrace self-fashioning, and resist self-shattering’s villainy—or, else. Halberstam, ever committed to failure as a means of survival, offers a queer alternative to said tyranny: “resist mastery,” “privilege the naive or nonsensical (stupidity),” and lastly “suspect memorialization.” I am tickled by the first two and enchanted by the third. As a ritual of power, Foucault might say, memorialization takes history and its messiness, wields a broom, and sweeps the record right up. What’s left? Tidy histories of triumph—Halberstam’s phrase, not mine. Gathering Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Saidiya Hartman’s Loses of Power, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters together, they make a rather compelling argument: to suspect and resist memorialization, indulge, if not privilege, certain forms of erasure, namely, forgetting. The act of forgetting, they purport, resists “the heroic and grand logics of recall” and releases different forms of memory, forms that adhere to radial arrangements instead of linear specters. Does Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest forget in a queer manner? Yes, I think so. By shifting its attention from the racial object to the racist subject (a Morrisonian move for sure), the film implores omission (and what is omission if not strategic forgetting?) as its predicate and implicates its viewers saying, like Halberstam and funnily enough the Smashing Pumpkins, “the killer in you is the killer in me” and that let’s no one off the hook. Great essay and great film!
Wow. I have yet to see the film but am so grateful for this extremely intelligent, thoughtful essay, which has left an impression on me in terms of how to attend to what I will be seeing on the screen. Thank you!
Wow! I will reread the review after reading the book, seeing the movie - probably twice. I will also copy this essay as a writing lesson. Vigorous use of language is deeply admired.
Thank you for the point about the sequence at the end of the film, I agree that it's a strange choice, and that the film here seems to lose its nerve. I think it would have been better simply to show Höss retching, as though viscerally trying to reject something unnameable, and then continuing down the stairs.
While taking a break from reading “The Counterfeit Countess” by White and Sliwa, I became engrossed in this self-reflection essay on the Holocaust horrors. Memorialization is necessary and yet can only be honestly produced by those who were there or are directly affected by the original events. The facts, objects, places of evil can only create “spaces” of learning, of history-making, of so-called understanding of what really happened. And yet this essay, the film, other such honest writings, art, and research are so necessary for us to finally “get it” - if that is possible. Thank you, for this essay.
I saw the film for the first time Friday night and have been thinking about it all weekend. This is exactly the analysis I needed to put my thoughts and feelings about it in order. Thank you
yes.
Saving most of this to read after I've seen the film!