The Zone of Interest

Earnest, and undoubtedly put together with great care and attention, but the fact that Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” (Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in 1963, that is, sixty years earlier) rolls so easily off every single critical pen that writes about this film ought to be cause for reflection: hasn’t the notion of not showing the horror the better to invoke its terrifying insidiousness itself become all too banal? All of the artistry displayed here doesn’t really convince me that this is anything more than yet another high school lesson for a generation that is no longer in the zone to learn it, because it has almost completely lost interest. The banality is depicted in such a painstaking, if not tedious way (a bit like ELEPHANT, from 2003, that is, twenty years earlier), but, if anything, I felt a wish for the filmmaker to suddenly break into that story of ordinary everydayness and force the viewer to confront exactly what lies behind it, and to do so, contrary to contemporary pieties, by using all of the affective power that can be conjured by means of twenty-first century cinema.

That said, the early scenes set during the warmer months did remind me that, when filming at Mauthausen, I felt that it was wholly right and proper to do so on a perfectly bright and clear summery day, it so often seeming as if filmmakers believe that the sun could never shine over a concentration camp, and the use of Joseph Wulf’s “Sunbeams” did remind me of the use made in THE ISTER (2004) of Paul Celan’s “Atemwende”. And it is true that filming in such locations, and on such topics, does force the filmmaker to ask themselves difficult questions about what to conceal and what to show, and how to do it, and THE ISTER itself has been criticised in that regard, particularly on an occasion in Marseilles (wrongly, in my view). No doubt Glazer did ask himself those kinds of questions, which are, as mentioned, very difficult, but I’m just not sure that he did come up with the best answers, or any very new answers, and I am far from certain that an adequate raison d’être can be found by telling the story in such a way that it reminds every viewer of the pressures of the life of the ordinary businessman, hoping for promotion, worried about demotion, pleased with the benefits but always at risk of being transferred out to the boonies.