The film "Zone of Interest" by the British director Jonathan Glazer, winner of this year's Oscar, has caused considerable controversy among writers and professionals in the fields of culture and cinema in Britain and America. Not because of its content, cinematography, or character construction, but because of what its director said when he received the Oscar.
Glazer (who is Jewish by birth) stated that the understanding of his film is not only achieved by dealing with the past or historical atrocities, but also by viewing it in the context of what is happening in Gaza today. He expressed his rejection of the use of the "Holocaust" to justify ongoing wars, dehumanization, and the perpetration of crimes.
In response, more
than a thousand cinema personalities who identified themselves as Jewish
rejected the comparison they said he made between the Nazi Holocaust and the
war in Palestine since October 7, 2023.
On the other hand, intellectuals and progressive Jewish organizations defended Glazer, arguing that the refusal to confront the past with the present and the attempt to confiscate the memory of the "Holocaust" are nothing but attempts to hide the crimes and the "genocidal war" waged by Israel against the Palestinians.
Naomi Klein, the Canadian feminist journalist and academic, wrote a powerful article in The Guardian in which she compared people's habit of living close to the genocide they know is happening (separated from its horror by a wall), as depicted in the film, with our lives today, just a few walls away from Gaza, where acts of genocide have been occurring for almost six months now, yet no one has intervened to stop them.
Between the banality of evil and the protection of roses
The story of "Zone of Interest" describes the daily details of the life of the family of a German Nazi officer who ran the Auschwitz camp, where the Nazis burned to death thousands of Jewish prisoners on his orders, after enslaving and torturing them and looting their possessions. It is immediately reminiscent of "the banality of evil," or its normality, as Hanna Arendt evoked in her book on Eichmann.
The family lives in
a house a few meters from the death factories, from which smoke occasionally
rises to indicate the burning of corpses. They sleep, wake up, celebrate with
food, clothes, gifts (and stolen goods), while their children play in a swimming
pool amid the sounds of screams, beatings, and execution shots coming from the
adjacent camp.
The father - the
officer - appears gentle and affectionate with his wife and children,
especially his daughters, to whom he reads bedtime stories after a long day of
routine work, of receiving instructions and then diligently carrying them out,
of conversing with his superiors and subordinates about the
"effectiveness" of performance and the importance of increasing
numbers (meaning the number of people killed), and about the best ways to
organize the "final solution" for the prisoners in the ovens and how
to cool them afterwards to empty their ashes.
Then we see him
angrily issuing orders to punish the German soldiers and SS members who
scornfully pick roses from the gardens that are encouraged to be tended and
beautified in and around the death camp.
At the same time,
we see his wife calmly planting and enjoying her garden at the foot of the wall
separating their home from Auschwitz, boasting about its beautiful colors and
encouraging her daughter to touch and smell the roses.
And so life goes on for a German family settled in occupied Poland, living next to the father's "work". And his work is nothing but "absolute evil", namely the extermination of "the other", who has been transformed into a number or an object or a matter devoid of any human attributes or relationships. Things reach the climax of the "banality of evil" at a moment when the officer-father is about to vomit, for reasons the director leaves us to guess, and then the camera suddenly and for a moment switches to what Auschwitz has become today, and we see janitors dusting rooms that witnessed daily massacres decades ago, and others polishing what remains of the crematoria, or wiping the transparent glass that separates visitors from thousands of shoes belonging to those who died in one of the most horrific atrocities of contemporary history.
Walls of Palmyra and Gaza's Killing Ground
But the "banality of evil," or complicity with it and then turning it into a shrine or museum to be isolated from the contemporary world and its ongoing crimes, is what the brilliant director Glazer emphasized his rejection of. He especially emphasized that a mirror has been set up between the coexistence with the horror depicted in his film and the Gaza war of today, with which we not only coexist, but with which there are those who use the past to hide their current massacres or to make the extermination of the humanity of others acceptable.
When we think of
this film, in which the director has managed to intensify the violence without
a single "bloody" scene, we can recall what Franz Fanon wrote about a
French officer in charge of torturing Algerian prisoners during the war of liberation,
and about his daily bureaucratic life in the prisons, before returning home to
face his family normally (he would later be haunted by nightmares). We can also
imagine how the years have passed and continue to pass in "Assad's
Syria," where life goes on and on not far from the walls of the prisons in
Palmyra in the 1980s or in Saidnaya today, while tens of thousands of Syrians
died or continue to die there under brutal beatings, turning into numbers or
images of bodies that we sometimes stare at on Facebook, then go on with our
daily lives and occupations despite their horror and our awareness of the
recurring events that lead to new images that we might see later.
And, of course, we can compare the rose garden in the film, meticulously tended next to the site of torture and extermination of prisoners, with all our gardens, or the gardens of the cities and towns where we live, geographically close to the killing field of Gaza, or visually in contact with its events, which we have been following for months directly through the media and social networks. We follow them with amazement, with anger, with an excess of hatred for the perpetrators and for the world that allows them to continue. And we follow them with sadness and grief, and with a helplessness that makes us try to forget them in the morning or in the evening so that we can breathe and go on with what we have to do or accomplish of ordinary or extraordinary tasks.
In this sense, "Zone of Interest" can be said to be a film that defies framing, exclusive classification, or connection to geography and time. It is undoubtedly about the Holocaust and about Auschwitz, but it is also and to the same extent about the everyday and routine human relationships that run parallel to mass murder and in its shadow, and about betrayal, disruption, ambition, exploitation, and the habituation to "evil" and the adaptation to its scenes, as if it were a decoration or a background sound that is always present, disturbing (causing sleeplessness) as much as it is domesticated. And "Zone of Interest" is also a frightening film for its realism, for the coldness of its characters (except for the officer's mother-in-law) and for its extraordinary ability to embody the meaning of "dehumanization" and what it can cause in terms of distortions, atrocities and burned corpses.
Fortunately, an "unknown Polish girl” infiltrates the events of the film at night. The director presents her in a "negative" strip, secretly and courageously riding her bicycle between the fields around Auschwitz, where the prisoners are forced to work hard during the day before being killed. She leaves them apples or a sprig of life among the roses and trees, reminding them that there are people who recognize them and refuse, as much as possible, to exclude them from common humanity, leaving them to their tormentors and the silent spectators who witness the smoke of their bones...
