Christian Freidel – Movie Musings

Chilling Holocaust film, its unseen horrors only overheard give it supreme power

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel (Rudolf Höss), Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höss), Ralph Herforth (Oswald Pohl), Daniel Holzberg (Gerard Maurer), Sascha Maaz (Arthur Liebehenschel), Freya Kreutzkam (Elenore Pohl), Imogen Kogge (Linna Hensel), Johann Karthaus (Klaus Höss), Lilli Falk (Heidetraut Höss), Louis Noah Wite (Hans-Jurgen Höss)

A family enjoys the delights of a summer day beside the river. They laugh, splash each other with water and amble home to their villa, next to where father works. They tune out the all-too-familiar sounds of that workplace to enjoy a family dinner. They are living the dream, out of the city, with a home and beautiful, landscaped garden. The family is Rudolf Höss’. The workplace is Auschwitz. The sounds are of the unimaginable horrors that make their life possible.

Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust movie is unlike any other ever made. Taking a Martin Amis novel as inspiration, Glazer creates a hauntingly observant film where the plot is simple (Höss works at Auschwitz, the family enjoys a series of everyday events, Höss gets re-posted, his wife remains in their home, Höss later returns to continue his work) but every single frame implies never-seen horrifying events. While the family are indifferent to the distant sounds of trains arriving, industrial churn, gunshots and screams, we can’t be. The only thing that separates the Höss’ heaven of their intricate garden and charming home from the hell of Auschwitz is a single wall.

Glazer’s film never leaves the house for the camp, meaning what we hear is our only clue to what is happening. The Zone of Interest uses sound like almost no other film I’ve seen. Sound designer Johnnie Burns creates an overwhelming soundscape that suggests horrors. The low rumble of industrial sound, the background hum of screams and cracks of gunshot, ignored by the family as white noise. It’s brilliant and sickeningly immersive that never for an instant lets you forget where we are. Glazer complements this with half-seen sights, the most striking the steam of a train arriving visible over the wall of the house, that add to our grim knowledge of what’s happening out of shot.

Glazer lets events play out with a chilling naturalism. Shot on concealed digital cameras with no artificial lighting, there is very little studied here at all. Instead, everything plays out with a terrifyingly low-key sense of reality. Conversations are at times mumbled, movements have a mix of casual and procedural and everything is kept determinedly undramatic. What emerges is the mundane, character-less nature of the Hösses. These people are evil in the sense that the wickedness of their deeds hasn’t even crossed their minds. Two sociopaths who pride themselves on their respectability, presiding over an industrial killing machine.

The film brilliantly balances a lack of overt events with acres of horrific implication. Fishing with his children, Höss steps on a half-seen jaw-bone and suddenly plucks them from the lake, running home with them to practically bleach them clean with the servants left to scrub the bathroom – it’s never stated that human remains are being washed from them, but the look on the face of these servants speaks volumes. (Höss later records a coded memo chastising his team for their lack of care, like a middle manager furious at an untidy storage room.) Hedwig’s mother wakes at night with her room flooded with red light. Opening a curtain to investigate, the camera sees her look of horror, a handkerchief covering her nose, while we only see the faint reflection of flames on the window. Moments like this fill the film, the implications of horrors out of shot.

At its heart, Zone of Interest brings startlingly to life Rudolf Höss, a man who admitted to murdering millions but wanted it known he did not tolerate overt cruelty to his victims. Played with a precise blankness by Christian Friedel, you realise if Hitler had charged him with organising the Reich’s stationary he would have gone about it with the same commitment and passion-free precision as he does mass murder. Does Höss have any idea, deep down, of his vileness? As he carefully, obsessively marches around the house every night shutting off lights and closing doors, is he subconsciously trying to defend his family and shut out reality, bury his knowledge of his evil in household procedure, or is he just as obsessive about this as he is in everything else?

His wife, played with a middle-class, aspirational coldness by Sandra Hüller, seems to have convinced herself she can enjoy all the benefits of the life of an Auschwitz camp commandant, without needing to think seriously about where it comes from. She tries on luscious clothing, brought to her from the camp, and obsessively tends and cares for her garden. Not that it stops her from lashing out at her servants like a petty tyrant. So devoted to her home is she, she refuses to leave it on Höss’ transfer back to Berlin, believing it to be the perfect place to raise her children.

It’s the children that subtly bear the brunt. As the film progresses, the damage to them becomes more and more clear, especially after Höss is reassigned and his attempts to control the environment are ignored by his successor. The daughter who cannot sleep at night, constantly walking the house. The younger son who overhears the forced drowning of a victim and mimics the guard’s cruel authoritarian “humour”. The older son who locks his brother in the greenhouse and mimics the hissing noise of gas. The Höss family are laying the roots to destroy their family in their obsessive desire to build a blinkered perfect home for them.

There is only one note of true kindness in The Zone of Interest. During his research, Glazer discovered a young Polish girl made it her mission to leave fruit at night for the inmates, hidden throughout the camp. Glazer captures this with thermal imaging cameras (eager to maintain his “rule” of no artificial light), giving this girl a sort of mystical, fairy-tale quality (we once even see her while hearing Höss read to his children at night). However, even this act of kindness is corrupted – the forced drowning is caused by a fight over an apple, presumably left by this child.

The Zone of Interest does lose some of its impact when it follows Höss to Berlin – it’s a film that flourishes best as a claustrophobic piece, focused on the house and its grounds. You could argue that The Zone of Interest is effectively a short film, expanded into feature length, making the same point over again. But, on reflection, part of the point is the power of the thudding repetition of that message, the overwhelming impact of people indifferently carrying on in the face of pure evil.

Does Höss realise this on some level? The Zone of Interest concludes with Höss dry-retching on the stairs – he’s such a shell he doesn’t even have enough in him to vomit up – before seeming to stare right out at us into the darkness. Glazer then finally takes us into the camp – to see the museum it is today, quiet, still, tended to with care by the staff. Höss’ life’s work is to create a memorial to his barbarity, where dedicated staff will make sure the picture of evil remains unblemished by dirt. It’s the first-time sound really drains out of the film and it makes for a powerful moment.

The Zone of Interest really lingers with the viewer. Glazer’s subtle and unflashy work builds the film into a powerful experience piece that leaves a lasting impact. It’s a film that grows even more powerful as you unpack the subtleties of its exploration of the banal nature of cruelty and the lasting impact of inhumanity on ourselves and others. A truly unique and important film.

The kids are not all right in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Christian Friedel (Teacher), Ernst Jacobi (Narrator), Burghart Klaußner (Pastor), Steffi Kühnert (Pastor’s wife), Rainer Bock (Doctor), Susanne Lothar (Midwife), Roane Duran (Anna), Leonie Benesch (Eva), Ulrich Tukur (Baron), Ursina Lardi (Baroness), Maria-Victoria Dragus (Klara), Leonard Proxauf (Martin), Josef Bierbichler (Baron’s steward)

I think it’s fair to say Michael Haneke has a mixed view of humanity. His films look at the dark side of human nature, and the hypocrisies and cruelty underpinning much of our society. The White Ribbon explores these ideas further, a parable focusing on a small German village in the months before World War One, looking at how the life in one village perhaps helped lay the moral and societal groundwork for the younger generation to grow up and embrace Nazism.

In the fictional village of Eichwald, tradition is strong. The town, and its morals, are governed by traditional authority figures. However, each of these figures fails to live up to the values they – often brutally – enforce on the village and, most especially, its children. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) is a distant autocrat, who talks of a duty of care but treats the villagers like property. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) preaches morality and abstinence, but bullies his (many) children and condemns utterly even the slightest deviation from his own rules. The doctor (Rainer Bock) is a studious clinician, who humiliates and devalues his lover, the town’s midwife (Susanne Lothar), and sexually abuses his teenage daughter Anna (Roane Duran). In late 1913, a series of unexplained and increasingly violent events occur, from an attempt to cripple the doctor to arson, kidnap, theft and the beating of the midwife’s handicapped son. The perpetrators remain a mystery – one which the decent but ineffectual teacher (Christian Friedel) attempts to uncover – his older self (Ernst Jacobi) providing an, at times, naïve narration.

Haneke’s aim is to explore the conditions that led a generation to embrace a regime that promotes the unthinkable. While it’s clear that a future of Hitler and fascism – neither mentioned once in the film – hover over everything, this parable could serve for any totalitarian regime. Haneke is not interested in specifics. What fascinates the director is the creation of a mind-set that enables people to willingly align themselves with horrific actions. The brilliance of The White Ribbon is that could be as easily applied to Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge as it can to Nazism.

Shot in a beautiful black-and-white, the film presents a series of striking images, imbued with an immense psychological depth and haunting sense of dread. Haneke’s mastery of visual imagery is sublime, and he paces the film perfectly. While it is easy to claim the film is slow – and it does take its time – the deliberation of the pacing, and the precision of each shot, is all part of giving the film its thematic weight. It’s like a medieval passion play, with every moment giving depth to the whole.

The film’s focus is on the children – tellingly, only characters below the age of about 20 are named. It’s their faces the camera returns to time and again – and the film is set in a key moment of many of their lives, where disillusionment with adults begin. The age when they begin to realise their parents are far from perfect and even hypocritical. The film more than suggests that it is the children – working in some combination or alone – responsible for the crimes that take place in the village. Their motivations range from anger and resentment to despair and a longing for escape.

Many of these events centre around the pastor’s family. Played with a perfect emotional austerity by Burghart Klaußner, the pastor judges all around him as unworthy, with his children suffering the brunt of his discipline. It’s easy to see he is overly harsh, hypocritical (the sheer number of his children suggests he hasn’t worked hard to suppress his own sexual feelings) and unjust. His son is tied to his bed while he sleeps to prevent “impure touching” and his daughter is blamed, and publicly humiliated by him, for a school disturbance she is trying to stop. He’s a father who demands respect but cannot inspire love.

Almost worst of all, he requires his children to wear a white ribbon, to constantly remind them of moral standards they have failed to live up to. These acts of stigmatisation and bullying are not balanced with any outward affection – whatever he may actually feel, the pastor is far too restrained to show any warmth – and Haneke demonstrates his children are taking all the wrong lessons from him. The learn to be cold, distant and judgemental, and that strength is vital and weaknesses are not to be tolerated: they beat out individual thinking, and replace it with cold conformity. A basically good man – and the pastor clearly believes he is doing his best to protect his children – rears children who see others as inferior and different, and stigmatisation as an essential part of life.

The whole village lives in medieval thrall to the baron. You could be believe this village was hundreds of years in the past, not a single century. The villagers slave on the baron’s fields, meekly tugging their forelocks to him in church. The baron takes unilateral decisions affecting everyone’s lives. His own family life is cold – his wife doesn’t love him (and her sexual, not romantic, faithfulness is the only thing that matters to him), while his weak young son is the victim of at least two crimes. It’s a pattern of distant, selfish authorities who believe they work for the good of the community, while taking everything they can from it.

But then corruption is also endemic at the home. Rainer Bock gives a chilling performance as the local doctor, respected by the community for his dedication, who treats those closest to him with disdain at best, and abusive cruelty at worst. A controlling, cruel man, the doctor is the clearest example in the film of the hypocrisy of the older generation, demanding respect, decency and obedience from the younger, while treating them with selfish vileness.

Haneke’s film is a grim – and disturbing – study of this sort of everyday horror and it effect on the psyche. The dehumanisation of the young is clear, and the growing casual cruelty they begin to dish out to others becomes more and more striking. The film taps into a Wyndhamish fear of the young, the children moving in packs, their respectful words not matching their air of menace. This unsettling feeling only grows because, for many of the crimes, we are never given a firm answer to who carries them out (although we can guess). Saying that, at least three acts of violence and sabotage are explicitly shown, all of them carried out by the young – enough for the viewer to suspect the others can be tied to the same generation.

The film does pepper itself with touches of hope – enough to suggest not everyone is destined to succumb to malevolent forces. The schoolteacher – sweetly played by Christian Friedel – is well-meaning, if ineffectual, and his courtship of the baron’s dismissed nanny Eva (an endearing Leonie Benesch) has a charming bashfulness. (Although the fact the couple are brow-beaten into postponing their marriage by her domineering father reminds us of the dominance of the older generation). After the pastor’s pet bird is killed (by his daughter, who crucifies the creature on his desk), he is moved to tears when his youngest son offers him his own pet bird to make him feel better (although inevitably the offer only promotes a curt “thank you” from the Pastor while his son is in the room). The women of the older generation all show signs for reluctance or discontent with the behaviour of the patriarchs, although any protest is of course in vain.

It’s touches like this that prevent Haneke’s film from being a lecture. The village isn’t inherently bad, just terribly misguided. This all enforces the universality of the film. You’re kidding yourself if you think this could only happen in Germany. These generational clashes and the twisting of an entire generation could happen anywhere. The world is what we make it, and the white ribbons that help us remember our innocence can just as easily be used to categorise us as the worthy and the unworthy. Haneke’s film is a brilliant, profound and challenging piece of work that rewards thought, analysis and rewatching. Quite possibly his masterpiece.