Southeast Gaza, Palestine (ca. 1911) | Underwood & Underwood / Public Domain
When viewed against the backdrop of what Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the UN has called “the most thoroughly documented genocide in history,” Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s recent film about the genocide of the Jews, takes on a deeper meaning: “The reason I made this film,” Glazer said shortly after its release, in December 2023, “is to try to restate our proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past. For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware—and fearful—that these things are on the rise again with the growth of right-wing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”
Most of the film concerns the everyday life of the German family of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant in charge of the death camp at Auschwitz. Eschewing a common artistic tendency to depict and inadvertently fetishize the spectacle of violence, Glazer focuses on sound and contrasting imagery: in a key scene, we’re exposed to close shots of Hedwig Höss’s flowers set against the screams of victims from the camp next door. The montage erupts into a blank red screen, signaling the narrative’s inability to carry the weight of the horrors.
At the same time, Glazer highlights the bureaucratic and administrative operations that constitute the everyday workings of political violence. He shows how evil first unfolds with engineered injuries that begin with dispossession and climax in the disappearance of entire populations. Far from sensationalizing the suffering of victims, Glazer focuses on the banality of the commandant’s everyday life, implying that anyone might in this way become complicit in what Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, called “radical evil.”
Zone of Interest is a film about mass dehumanization—not just about Auschwitz. Indeed, many have noted that the TikToks of IDF soldiers masquerading in the belongings of dead Palestinians bears a haunting resemblance to a scene in Glazer’s film wherein the wife of Rudolph Höss, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), adorns herself in the lipstick and fur jacket that once belonged to a victim of the gas chambers.
Almost a year into witnessing the events in Gaza and the Zone of Interest’s release, I find myself transfixed by Glazer’s film. I believe it exposes a current conceit of Western media institutions and governments, whereby “never again” takes on a tenor that is at once aggrandizes one horror and diminishes another. At the very core of this paradox, albeit cleverly disguised, is a set of racializing—more specifically, orientalist—framings that deem Palestinian lives inferior.
In his controversial speech accepting the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Glazer explicitly criticized evoking the memory of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s current war in Gaza. His depiction of the Holocaust is effective because it portrays the systematized and institutionalized mundanity (or banality, if you will), demonstrated by the Nazi military order, a capitalist structure as much as any. And in doing so, Glazer highlights the relationality of such horrors to our everyday institutional structures and practices.
There’s no room for innocence or beauty in this film. During the second act of the film, we watch one of the prisoners use the ashes from the gas chambers to fertilize the soil of Hedwig Höss’s garden. In another scene, the older Höss child locks his younger brother up in the green house and mimics the hiss of the gas chambers just a few feet beyond the walls of their garden. No matter the size of the walls or the borders, violence, much like any contagion, seeps into soil and into blood streams.
Through the abjection, we must not forget that the horrors of the Holocaust and Gaza are horrors told through the occupation of space—a strategy that students, globally, are turning to in order to demand divestment from their universities. Shot primarily on surveillance cameras, Zone of Interest makes legible a historical atrocity of a similar nature, without reducing such legibility to crude comparison or esotericism. Not an unreasonable strategy given that, for example, despite the ongoing violence taking place in the West Bank and Gaza, Americans continue to fly to Israel for birthright and leisure trips.
Glazer insisted that his film is not intended to extend the Zionist appropriation of the Shoah for militaristic purposes. Rather, it is intended to warn against all such horrors—including the horror of Israel’s current war in Gaza.
You’re absolutely correct! Thank you!