Macabre Camp & Memory Pictures: Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and Ceija Stojka’s “We Lived in Secrecy (A Roma Memory)”

Laced with easy ironies, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest forgoes subtlety in its rendering of the mundane monstrosities of Nazi concentration camp administrators through one distinctly complacent family. Aided by the minimalism of Mica Levi’s shrieking and belching score, cottagecore bliss is juxtaposed against an aural backdrop of carnage where occasional gunshots and screams disturb the tranquility. The atrocities are visible insofar as we see the tip of a watchtower and a raging furnace expelling smoke, where human ash drifts across an otherwise pristine landscape – impromptu fertilizer for a garden adorning the concrete wall, which jarringly separates heaven from hell on earth. 

According to Manohla Dargis, Zone of Interest is a “hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film.” Some other particularly tart remarks by critics have described the film as a kind of snuff movie akin to watching Nazis as cows in pasture, though this impression seems intended. Glazer’s leads are entirely grotesque, with its central figure S.S. commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) sporting a severe high and tight Nazi cut, alongside wifey dearest’s tightly coiled do. He routinely arrives home in blood-soaked boots, appearing to care for his family, though you get the sense he’s more deeply attached to his horse and the sanctity of lilac beds. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), the dutiful woman of the house, is a giddy profiteer, literally oinking like a pig after asking her husband when they can vacation in that Italian spa where they had so much fun before the war. This is also after she matter-of-factly dumps a pile of silk undergarments on a dining room table, instructing her housemaids to “pick one each.” She then retreats to the privacy of her bedroom to slip on a newly acquired fur coat and try a shade of lipstick she retrieves from its pocket. 

This peak evil camp figure rivals Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest plenty, particularly as she threatens her maids over her bountiful breakfast for two (which her own mother has no stomach for, having been kept up the night before gazing dumbstruck at the blazing skies) that she’ll have her husband send them to the furnace if they slip up or unwittingly spite her. When her husband is reassigned to another concentration camp, she insists on staying put. She simply relishes this myopic, lecherous life she has carved out for herself, nevermind the unfathomable misery next door. She is so content – so complicit – that she never wants to leave. He might be squeamish about his kids swimming in a stream after discovering some human remains drifting in it, though he’s ultimately resigned to his next station away from his family, where at least he can have extramarital sex with a servantile featured extra who might be on loan from the camps, or perhaps given her impenetrable expression, a regular sex worker. Not once are these Höss monsters in psychic torment over the suffering of their scapegoated neighbors, too caught up in their own material desires being met.

There’s nothing discreet about making a Holocaust film – removing the explicit horrors doesn’t make it any less snuffy. Glazer avoided the lustful protagonist at the center of Martin Amis’s novel, upon which the film is loosely based, just as the director is determined, wisely, to never get too close to these people. He allows his audience to watch from a detached distance, and to consider our own complacency as voyeurs. A Glazer-adjacent film that sprang to mind is László Nemes’s Son of Saul, in which the camerawork is the inverse of Glazer’s reticence. László’s cinematographer keeps the action tightly fixed nearly at all times on the expressive face of a Sonderkommando prisoner Saul (Géza Röhrig) as he desperately searches through the camp for a rabbi to deliver burial rites over a boy’s corpse. The terror around him is always happening, just out of frame or in a smeared, chaotic background. 

Correspondingly, the only subjects in Glazer’s film that receive tight close-ups are bright flowers in bloom, a succession of hues building to blood red. By the film’s end, Glazer leaps forward in time to the Auschwitz memorial where custodians vacuum eerie, death-haunted chambers and wipe down glass display windows, behind which mountains of shoes and suitcases are sealed. It’s a strangely moralizing moment for a film that flaunts its amorality – a reminder of the incomprehensible genocide that remains out of the camera’s reach, where irony clashes with sincerity, and the devastation of the past is offered up for dark tourism. By showing the methodical preservation of the space maintained by an underclass of cleaners, Glazer hammers home his point — the point being, Look how masterfully restrained all this is!

Restraint and elision, after all, have become arthouse techniques for resisting the hand-wringing melodrama of previous Holocaust films. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long eye-witness assemblage, set a high standard in 1985. Lanzmann’s epic begins in a serene landscape as a survivor (who only barely survived) recounts and retraces the parameters of a grassed-over concentration camp site he recognizes and recounts from memory. Of course, a film featuring actual survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust is of more poignance and importance than a fastidious reenactment. Shoah exists to document and redefine history, not to illicit praise for taking some vague moral high ground. The most generous reading of Zone is that it’s both a condemnation of passive fascism and a distillation of the looming threat currently cycling into the zeitgeist. 

My reservations while watching Zone were heightened by an exhibition I happened to view earlier of self-taught artist Ceija Stojka at Fleiss-Vallois. Her vividly visceral paintings and drawings explode with feeling, dread, and desperation, as well as childlike wonderment. Born in Austria, Stojka (1933 – 2013) was a Romani Gypsy deported with two hundred members of her extended family to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered on arrival. Stojka survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. She began painting at the age of fifty-five, and it’s breathtaking to see how her inner life burst forth in frenetic brushwork, with homes under fire-deluged skies in lurid orange and pink, raging above lush green forests with scratchily sketched pines. Stojka’s landscapes are wrenching, evocative, and alive. Even her idyllic childhood scenes are shadowed by the trauma to come. In one untitled painting from 1993, teapots and crockery are set out beneath a wagon surrounded by women washing clothes in a nearby pond, a man tending cows, a picnic rug, discarded harnesses, and a smattering of small houses in the background. Black crows appear as gashes in the sky — an ominous warning. 

As my editor duly drew to my attention, these disquieting pastoral landscapes bear resemblance to other memory pictures by Holocaust survivors, such as Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s tenderly hand-embroidered works on view at the American Visionary Art Museum, where cows graze and flowers blossom as German soldiers slaughter their young prisoners nearby. If you can’t make it to Baltimore, you can get a sense of the work and Krinitz’s fascinating story of survival in a short documentary Through the Eye of the Needle. Krinitz had her daughters as an impetus to create and did not have a public audience in mind, and Stojka might not have expected a broader audience either. Like Stojka, Krinitz conveys the porousness between the normalcy of daily life in fields tending to animals, and the murderous persecution happening in parallel. Krinitz herself described the morose skies filled day and night with black clouds and crows which she said were like vultures hovering constantly above them. At the same time, nature is a majestic and sometimes protective force for both of them. Krinitz recalls an alarming moment when German soldiers approached and began questioning her identity, which she concealed pretending to be a Polish-Catholic farmhand. A pesky swarm of bees put the men off from further probing. 

Where Krinitz’s stitched narrative is meticulous and intricate, Stojka’s work is less refined and garish – even her gypsy figures looming in the foliage among red dashes of flowers seem ghoulishly bleary-eyed and deformed. Another work by Stojka portrays a burning, crimson-red sky streaking above people fishing by a pond below, beneath red-flecked trees. A more mysterious composition depicts a winged creature hovering beside a mother and child emerging from a door in a wild forest, as yellow streaks of paint descend upon them. In scenes documenting memories of her incarceration, there’s no mistaking the horror. Death Sits in the Crematorium (1997) shows a mass of naked women clustered like cattle, surrounded by officers wielding black whips. One forsaken woman looks directly at the viewer – a blank face with just a hint of aggrieved eyes and mouth. Some of the women seem crowned in glitter, a primary art class effect that finds a point of culmination in Auschwitz, August 1944 (2007) in which a crude rainbow juts out from a furnace that billows thick red smoke, flanked on either side by portals of heaven and hell — a maternal figure standing at one archway on one side, and a red-black void on the other. 

Adorno’s claim that to create after Auschwitz is “barbaric” undergirds the chasm in Stojka’s work – her compulsion to illustrate her traumas, to convey the brutally skewed world as she knew it, to an audience that can hardly begin to fathom it. Through sparingly sampled poems and paint, Stojka sought to remind the world of her obliterated Romani people – the victims and few survivors who were seldom acknowledged and continued to be peripheral long after the war’s end. With their impressionistic directness, the paintings present viewers with an immersive proximity to the historical reality, which The Zone of Interest shows through a narrow, aestheticized keyhole. I mean keyhole a little literally too, as one of Glazer’s techniques is to situate hidden cameras around the house so that the actors are unaware as they move around the rooms and corridors, adding to that icky voyeur vibe (he did this also in Under the Skin). Glazer doubles down on perversity at all turns, particularly toward the end when commander Höss attends a formal soirée, later admitting to his wife over the phone that he was distracted at the party thinking about the logistics involved in gassing all the attendees. This is the film’s most dazzlingly droll moment – barbarism as rote reflex.

The notion that ur-fascism reaches a peak every hundred or so years (and yes, folks, that means we’re about due) doesn’t seem that far-fetched at a time when ressentiment and vengeance (and in addition last week, the assassination of a dissident) continue to ramp up on the world stage. At the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards, as Glazer’s inimitable composer received their deserved prize for Zone’s score, Mica Levi humbly expressed their wish for a ceasefire in Gaza. Though Levi’s plea was not the first or last attempt to rupture the normalcy of business-as-usual film industry proceedings, and though most of us are not plotting new ways to exterminate populations to preserve our family unit – the reality on street level is one in which we’re interchangeably mortified and benumbed as we go on living knowing what we know, which is also when you think about it, kind of barbaric.

 

Jessica Almereyda is a writer based in New York.