Life is good, on a fine day, by a glittering lake. A family picnic on the grass, a merry swim, and the comforting of a crying baby. Such is the opening scene of “The Zone of Interest,” a new film from Jonathan Glazer. The family is that of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. Later, as darkness gathers, they drive back home to their orderly house, beside the walls of Auschwitz.
Höss is not a fictional invention. He was the commandant at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, and returned there in May, 1944, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, specifically to oversee the extermination of Hungarian Jews. Their arrival in unprecedented numbers—up to twelve thousand a day—was a logistical challenge to which S.S. Obersturmbannführer Höss was trusted to rise. Train lines were extended so that they ran right up to two of the crematoriums. The entire operation even bore his name: Aktion Höss. A rare honor.
Of the killings that were meted out under the aegis of Höss, “The Zone of Interest” shows none. Much of the story is set in the house where he and his loved ones dwell, with its pretty garden, rich in blooms. There are trips to the surrounding countryside, although, in one unfortunate incident, Höss is obliged to chivy his offspring out of a river, where they are paddling, because human remains have washed downstream. Another inconvenience: the daily routine of the Höss household is punctuated by yelps and cries, the chug of trains, the firing of weapons, and a low but discernible roar, as if some beast—a fire-breathing dragon—had its lair beyond the garden wall. What lies out of sight need not be out of earshot. Either way, you might think, it cannot be out of mind.
Think again. “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” The words are Dostoyevsky’s, in “Memoirs from the House of the Dead,” and he is writing of prisoners in Siberia. The definition applies, however, not just to the victims of cruelty but also to its perpetrators. What is demonstrated by “The Zone of Interest”—which Glazer adapted, very obliquely, from a novel by the late Martin Amis—is that, given the right conditions, people can discover in themselves a pathological talent for ignoring the torments of others. Look at Frau Höss, sorting through clothing that has been stripped from those who are due to be gassed (the implication is clear, though never spelled out) and seeing what takes her fancy. Finding a fur coat, she models it in front of a mirror, turning from side to side to catch her best angle. This is, I would say, the most repellent image in the movie, enshrining all that is pitiless in Hüller’s terrifying performance. Who will merit the lower circle of Hell: Höss, discussing the most efficient method for meeting his murderous quota, or Hedwig, serving coffee to friends?
It’s no surprise that, when Höss is posted to another job, Hedwig is aghast. She wants to stay at Auschwitz, tending her flowers, rather than uproot the children and move on. Such is the plain shape of the plot. In a sense, “The Zone of Interest” is a simple work: calmly composed, fiercely controlled, and dedicated to the proof of one central irony—the nearness of ordinary lives to a tumult of death. Glazer achieves what he sets out to do, and you have to admire his tenacity, his technical skill, and his tact. Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.
Yet one has to ask: Is this movie couched in its most effective form? In making the same point, however morally urgent, over and over again, does the film fortify or weaken its case? Go back to “Night and Fog,” Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary, from 1956—filmed partly in Auschwitz and Majdanek, another site of organized slaughter in Poland—and you will find the same argument put forward with greater economy. We see archival photographs of a commandant’s residence (where, a narrator tells us, “his wife keeps house and entertains”) and of guests playing chess and enjoying drinks. The sequence lasts roughly fifteen seconds; the whole movie is over in half an hour. If “The Zone of Interest” were that long it would attract fewer viewers, but I wonder if such brevity might not heighten its power to stupefy an audience, as “Night and Fog” does, and to reduce us to silence.
Glazer’s previous feature, “Under the Skin,” has clawed at me since it came out, ten years ago. It’s too early to say whether “The Zone of Interest” will do the same. What will linger, no question, is the score by Mica Levi, who seems to make music out of pain, replete with whisperings and groans. Most extraordinary of all, we get nocturnal scenes, dotted throughout the movie and shot in black-and-white, using thermal imaging, in which a young girl is seen secreting apples in the landscape nearby. For a while, there is no knowing who she is, whether the fruit (which glows in the dark) is poisonous or life-giving, and whether we are watching a dream or a weird substratum of the horrors unfolding at Auschwitz. Nor is there any comfort in suggesting that the girl could have sprung from a book of old German fairy tales. We know how those can end.
One way of approaching “Anselm,” a new documentary by Wim Wenders, is to see it as a sequel, of sorts, to “The Zone of Interest.” The German artist Anselm Kiefer was born in March, 1945, just as the age of Rudolf Höss, and of all that he espoused, was falling apart. Whether you can or should create art in the wake of mass ruination, and what form that art will take, are matters with which Kiefer has rarely ceased to contend. In 1969, he photographed himself giving the Sieg heil—a criminal gesture in postwar Germany—at various European locations, including the Colosseum, in Rome. Since then, he has grown industrious and toweringly ambitious, to the point of constructing actual towers. Never is he more fertile than when dealing in blight. His sculptures, paintings, drawings, and books—not so much published texts as booklike objects, whose pages may be made of lead—seem like testaments to the memory of things too heavy to bear.
In choppy fashion, “Anselm” cuts to and fro among events in Kiefer’s life. Dramatization abuts recorded fact. Anselm the boy, in shorts, with a satchel on his back, is played by an actor, as is the grownup Kiefer, with a mustache, setting off to meet Joseph Beuys (an early mentor) in a VW Beetle, with canvases rolled up and stacked like logs on its roof. Much of the movie, though, is set in the present day, with the real Kiefer going about his business. And what a business! Here is art made with muscle and cool tools. One painting is laid flat on the floor, so that Kiefer can lace it with molten lead; in closeup, we see the splatter and fizz. A long palette knife is the nearest that he comes to a paintbrush. Goggle-free, he wields a flamethrower, with which, like a farmer burning stubble, he sets fire to canvases pasted with straw—a material to which his work has obsessively returned. Assistants then douse the blaze.
Notice, also, the question of scale. The monumental (a far from neutral term, in the light of Nazi aesthetics) holds few terrors for Kiefer. Indeed, there is defiance in his panoramic ventures. I can’t forget the shock of standing for the first time in front of “Aschenblume,” or “Ash Flower,” a vast painting that occupied Kiefer from 1983 to 1997, in which a dead sunflower clings, upside down, to a rat-colored surface, its seedless head bedded in cracked earth. In “Anselm,” we see Kiefer using a motorized platform that can be raised and lowered, the better to toil on an especially large picture, as if he were washing windows. But how can a film begin to convey these Brobdingnagian dimensions?
Easy. Just find a cinema screen to match the art. I saw “Anselm” not only in 3-D but in IMAX—conditions I hadn’t encountered since “Avatar: The Way of Water” (2022), which Wenders has said he loves. Here are Kiefer’s epic installations, unfurling grandly across our frame of vision. We are ushered through the spaces that he has made his own: a studio so big that he needs a bicycle to scoot around in it; a repurposed brick factory; and a two-hundred-acre site in Barjac, in southern France. If the result is not as fluent as “Pina” (2011), Wenders’s earlier exercise in 3-D, that’s because “Pina” was about a dance company, to whose movements the camera became a willing partner. The latest movie is both more fractured and more indulgent, and I reckon that Wenders misses a trick; many of Kiefer’s densest paintings are themselves in 3-D, as it were, with pigments and other ingredients jutting out like frozen mud, and they deserve to be filmed from the side, not merely head on. Nonetheless, “Anselm” compels attention. We long-term Kiefer nerds may not learn much, but so what? It’s more important that newcomers thrill to—or recoil from—this self-mythicizing figure who forges sculptures out of fighter planes and U-boats. The zones of interest run deep. ♦
