Last film by Jonathan Glazer, The Area of Interest represents the intimacy of Rudolf Höss' home (Christian Friedel), commander of Auschwitz who lived with his family – literally – two steps from the largest concentration camp and then extermination of the Third Reich. The clinical application of the final solution took over one million predominantly Jewish men, women and children. Back to this new stage film that essentially renews the duty of memory by directly questioning our present.
Smoke crowns under a silent blue sky
It's been almost eight months since we attended the Cannes Film Festival at the first The Area of Interest and impossible to forget this inaugural black screen that seemed to last an eternity, sign of a stifling projection. Paradoxically blinded by the darkness (or almost), it was thought to feel a fainting light behind the shadows. The senses always get used to deprivation, to the image of the brain that in total shadow generates meaning through hallucinations. Metaphor of « Unconsciousness of genocide » As Hannah Arendt pointed out, this deep black is like the wall that separates the family home from the camp from death. It is also this monochrome sky chosen to illustrate the poster of the film with remarkable accuracy.
Jonathan Glazer plays the permanent contrast by the methodical separation of an ordinary life made obscene by the complicit knowledge of horror: that which only a few bricks covered with ivy render invisible. Etymologically separation brings together as much as it separates. His wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tells his visiting mother fun : « Jews behind the wall » ; single and single direct reference to Untermenschen. No one can integrate the life that one leads so close to death, not even a mother, although the embarrassment eventually replaces the polite smile addressed to his daughter. How can we conceive the horror when death even infiltrated the groundwaters in 1942, since the crematory furnaces cannot keep up with the infernal rate imposed by Himmler?
This black screen, prologue then coda, erases the boundaries between fiction and documentary and leaves the horror of the imagination and the imagination of horror to fight. Without images during these sequences, the sound takes over as much as it leaves room for introspection. At times, we think we hear this deaf buzz again on the other side of the wall. The British director scrupulously ensures that he never aestheticizes or fetishizes the Holocaust, which has become inseparable from the logic of the duty of memory and paradox of the museum logic as we will return.
In order not to deprive it of its substance, Jonathan Glazer chose instead to renew grammar with fixed planes without any artificial light. All tropes must disappear and this requires careful attention to detail. Unlike the aesthetics of films like Die Nacht und Nebel or the power of the violence of images of Salo or the 120 Days of SodomThe horror of the Holocaust is in full light but invisible. Smart choice that responds directly to the logic of genocide whose object is to erase the other.
There is also a clear desire to let the images talk to each other thanks to the original use of ten fixed cameras. The latter were controlled remotely by a dedicated team to shoot scenes simultaneously in different pieces on the stage. This distanceing is an integral part of the critical system desired as a mere observation of the ordinary life of a Nazi acquired in the depths of his being at the thesis of the NSDAP. « I didn't want to show the pictures myself. I think these images weigh on every pixel » Explains the director. Rather, the latter maintains a sublimal relationship to the unsaid which dialogues by silence with the unconscious of the viewer.
The Auschwitz commander speaks
Jonathan Glazer makes sure to transcribe a linear daily from a quasi-neurasthenic manager, a Man to have exhausted by the magnitude of a task that transcends any question and to which he dedicates himself entirely. His brief removal from Auschwitz camp following the discovery of internal affairs and the ricochets of his adultery particularly affects him. His wife is even more devastated by the idea that his awakened dream will collapse.
When he was taken from the iron cross in World War I, Rudolf Höss defined his childhood years by three structural elements in his autobiography entitled The Commander of Auschwitz speaks : « a deep piety, the habit of not externalizing his feelings and total submission to the orders of all adults ». Qualitys in perfect harmony with his future mission. He who took his first steps to the far right in the Artam league soon gave up on agriculture. He joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1934, at the request of Himmler, seven years before the final solution was adopted.
In Glazer's film, the key steps in transforming the concentration camp into the methodical and productivist extermination of all humanity are seen immediately. With a discipline derived from industrial agriculture, Rudolf does not appear as a bloody monster but rather as an ordinary man without charisma, a performer marked by a humanity defect. This apathy questioned and again questioned psychiatrists and historians. The psychological profile of this Nazi commander is indeed confusing. He remained faithful to the ideology of the party, even during the Nuremberg trial, in his autobiography and until his execution, leaving his words with an ambiguous job of the past suggesting that he had been human for a time:
« Let the general public continue to regard me as a ferocious beast, a cruel sadist, as the murderer of millions of human beings: the masses cannot have another idea of the former Auschwitz commander. They will never understand that I, too, had a heart. »
Genocide: Never again?
La Area of interest is emotionally as icy as a fascinating intellectual object of modernity. Necessarily ankylosed by the absence of intrigue, the viewer passes through contrary states. It is the interpretation of the sound that fills the images and boredom (very real) also participates in the experience. Like the repetition and slowness of Rudolf's daily life, the film covers two nearby heterotopies but hermetically partitioned by this indecent wall: that of the extermination camp and that of the family cell. The only common denominator is Nazism, which allows its two spheres to coexist. The spectator thus stifles under a kind of genocide of atmosphere whose indistinguishable nature is by definition unsustainable.
Beyond its historical dimension, The Area of Interest directly questions the effects of memory duty in a particular sequence that offers another resonance to the film. In response to the anniversary scene of the beginning of the film where Rudolf went down the stairs blindfolded, followed by his children, the epilogue responds with another descent: that of an endless staircase. Rudolf stops in the middle of the screen and then vomits for no apparent reason, before returning to the depths. Without the viewer seeing the transition, the film shifts from fiction to reality.
Maintenance agents methodically dusted the windows behind which the victims' shoes simmer (memory image par excellence). Without emotion, they are like alienated by a present rendered indifferent to time. Glazer refuses to remain confined to the past. This is the paradox of the museum and its fetishes. In watermark, we can see the corollary of decades that separate the contemporary from the genocide: forgetfulness. It is the whole dialectic of the word catastrophe that the duty of memory is justly proscribed: that of a word whose duality suggests a drama past as an unwavering event to come. Would the frenetic consumption of memory images deprive us of our ability not to repeat history?
Passionate your criticism! I was able to find out at the GIFF some time ago and I was unable to put words on this film. I won't fail to see him again at the movies at the end of the month...
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