The Violence of Invisibility: Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest

Everything begins with a black screen and noise. A noise that hits like a feeling before we get a single image. Its effect on a packed theater is immediate, the still darkness and layers of industrial synth noise building over the span of an eternity-like few minutes. With this moment, unconventionally non-cinematic, director Jonathan Glazer announces the psychic essence of his film, one structured by its absences and what it decides not to show us. The Zone of Interest follows the family life of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children as they live out the National Socialist vision of the future, directly outside of the death camp. It is adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name by English author Martin Amis. 

Their house is framed by Hedwig’s expansive garden which shares a wall with the out-of-sight camp. There is a pool and a gazebo, and a visiting relative remarks the family have “fallen well on their feet.” The housekeeping is performed by local girls, while their grounds are tended to by a group of invisible prisoners only permitted to appear after the Höss' turn their backs. Hedwig stocks her closet with fine fur coats and dresses stolen from female prisoners, bragging about her finds with the wives of other camp officials. The garden is fertilized with ash from the crematorium. 

What Glazer never shows us is the interior of the camp. Instead, its presence creeps in through different ways. The film’s score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn decorate the Höss' garden with a constant hum of screams and industrial noise from over the camp wall. We hear guards bark orders in the distance, imitated by the family’s youngest son as he plays in his bedroom. The red glow of the crematoriums paints the night sky while the commandant enjoys a cigar. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal frames the landscapes of the house against the camp’s architecture of towers and housing blocks. Its louring presence structures the Höss' home just as it does their lives. Glazer and Żal’s compositions share many qualities with Kubrick’s tightly perspective-oriented style. Żal’s camera quietly bears witness, at a medium distance, to the domestic goings on of the household and the quiet violence of the Höss' mundane, parasitic existence. He creates a visual lexicon which is restrained, which should not be mistaken for detachment. Instead, his images betray the brutality behind the facsimile of suburban, upwardly mobile  living which the Höss family  has  accomplished for themselves. 

Glazer’s film is interested in the violence of invisibility: how the Nazi officers who fed the bloodlust of the Holocaust lived alongside their obliteration of Europe's Jewish population. The film frustrates and actively undermines any possible identification with his subjects. If we take to be true what Roger Ebert said that cinema is a “machine that generates empathy,” it is hard to see how any can be generated for the Höss family. The characters which confront us are as evil as they are pathetically bland. It is a disjunction, the attempt at domestic living alongside mass slaughter, which is almost comedic in its extremity. Glazer displays with laser like precision that the cruelty by which the Höss's have come to realize their idyllic family life is, in fact, the necessary accompaniment to large-scale acts of state brutality, that they be supported by an infrastructure of decisively passive cruelty which renders the victims and their suffering unseeable. 

This approach, focusing on the lives of the perpetrators over depicting the suffering of the victims, inverts how cinema has traditionally visualized atrocity. It is understandable then that some have misconstrued Glazer’s goal to be asking the audience to somehow “feel” for the Höss family. In practice, their cruelty and viciousness are made readily apparent. Glazer constructs the perspective of the film by placing us within the interior of the profoundly sick society which enacted the Holocaust. 

Periodically interrupting the diurnal scenes of the Höss' home life is a sequence which presents an antipode to the film’s rhythm. We see a young girl, under cover of darkness, place apples under the shovels of camp prisoners and collect their messages to the outside world. The girl’s work is shot as if taking place in another reality, inverted black-and-white photography gives this sequence the aesthetic of night vision goggles, secretive and deadly. We watch as she uncovers a note and brings it home, it is a poem. The only testament in the film we witness from a Jewish character, is based on the writings of Joseph Wulf—a real victim to the Auschwitz factory of death. Given in subtitle as the girl performs accompaniment on piano, it is a transcendent and haunting moment which gets to the heart of Glazer’s manipulation of vision and representation.

The film does not depict what ended up happening to Commandant Höss. He was eventually executed by hanging after being found guilty of crimes against humanity and the murder of 3 million people at the 4th Nuremberg Tribunal. A functionary to antisemitism, a footnote to an unimaginably dark moment in modern history, a particularly blood-soaked cog in a machine of death. The film does not stretch into this part of his life. Instead near the end we are shown Höss in a moment of professional triumph. He is given a promotion and a ceremony. As he leaves his office see him struck by a coughing fit while walking down a flight of stairs. What does this tell us? Similar episodes are often used as cinematic shorthand to visualize a character’s revulsion at their own actions. I believe it is safe to say Höss had no remorse, even at the end. Perhaps it's just the effects of breathing in the camp’s ash and smoke.

The final shots of the film take place today. Workers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum dust the former gas chambers and polish the exhibit windows displaying mountains of shoes, crutches, and other items stolen from the dead bodies of prisoners. Records of the lives taken. The film’s finale invites much speculation. As the historical happening of the Holocaust moves further into the past, how do we continue to interact with its legacy, with its lesson? By the end of the film the victims are still left without a voice. Is history always so silent? 

What Glazer’s film so impressively displays is the logic of genocidal violence from within its own lived reality. The goal of genocidal intent is not merely the erasure of people from a territory, but rendering a people silent, eliminating their capacity to speak for themselves. The revulsion we feel at the Höss family is also a revulsion at ourselves, at the invisible armies of labor which our illusion of normal life is built upon. At the innumerable, unnamed genocides which service our existence, at the death camps which produce our society’s goods. And us, living just over the walls which have been built, we’re told, for our protection. If we’re still breathing okay, it’s only because the smoke hasn't gotten too bad.