The Zone of Interest (2023), dir. Jonathan Glazer

As in the Martin Amis novel from 2014, adapted. Due for US release mid-December.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vfg3KkV54

(I just saw Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall the other day so this looks like one hell of a one-two.)

Hmm, I know Alfred saw it, wasn't totally positive, and maybe I missed discussion elsewhere. Just saw it myself -- I appreciated the coldness and the pettiness.

Yeah, rather on-the-nose despite unsettling moments

The sound design of this film should win every award for such things. Most amazing aspect of the film, although Hüller is also great. As my wife put it, she moves around "like she hasn't taken a shit in 15 years."

Beyond the very obvious similarities with the occupation/destruction of Gaza this film evokes, it unsettles down to a microlevel. Hüller modeling a Jewish woman's fur coat that she's received is obviously grotesque, but most of us reading this also do a lot of compartmentalizing about the source of some of the clothes and goods we purchase.

Saw this on Saturday, one of those films I can appreciate more than enjoy, Glazer certainly achieved what he set out to do in evoking the banality of evil, and reading up on Höss and his family it seems to have been very accurate. The sound design was astounding, yes, that long black screen at the start and the sounds over the end credits, also the photography was excellent throughout. But I'm still not sure I really took anything new away from it. I was talking to my wife about it yesterday and she wondered why there's another film about Auschwitz when so many other human-made horrors are left undiscussed, both historically and in the present day, I think it does bring home the message more clearly if it's discussing an event absolutely everyone can agree is 100% evil, but otoh with the holocaust there's also a danger that it can be filed away as unique to a country and a time, and no greater lesson learned. One thing I felt was that the family seemed very much like an English family of the time, so maybe being a little too critical here, and I'm not sure if I want to batter people with "YOU are capable of this too!" - but it would be a bit more interesting and maybe that's what we need.

Well, I did learn that Nazis were evil people who had families.

xp I agree with a lot of that, however one thing I think the ending shows

with the women cleaning the Auschwitz museum, is that even the realized hope that history will judge monsters accurately can be cold comfort indeed.

The film is such a (deliberate) closed circle that it didn't leave me with much to think about.

I read about his daughter yesterday, her story raises a lot of questions and would have been a good (if unoriginal) framing device

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/heaven-in-auschwitz-living-as-a-killer-s-daughter-8803930.html

I felt similarly ambivalent. I appreciated some aesthetic choices more after I read about them (e.g., not to use conventional film lighting), but there's not much of a film beyond the conceptual premise. (Although that, too, is by design, I suppose?) The one line that sticks with me is the horrific observation Hoss makes to Hedy over the phone at the end.

I liked it a lot. It seems to me like the first film to treat Holocaust as a Historical Event, instead of as lived experience. Or the first film about Holocaust made after the survivors have gotten too old to be the link to the past. As such, it's a bit fumbling and unsure of itself, but also very different.

I don't really think it's about the 'banality of evil', though. The Höss family are just plain evil. I think itt's very obvious with the reaction of the mother how much they've chosen a life as mass murderers.

Yes, it's surely a film about the monumental psychic effort - the endless laundry, literal and metaphorical - it takes to try to ignore the noise, smell, touch and taste of industrialised murder. I think the dreamlike, fairytale nightvision scenes justified the film by themselves.

I was wondering how much of this story is based upon true accounts of their life. I found the reaction of Hedy's mother to be one of the more fascinating aspects, and wondered if that was in line with anything that occurred in real life.

There's this robotic uncanny valley aspect, completely inhumane people pretending to be human and going through the motions of a normal family life.

Yes, it's surely a film about the monumental psychic effort - the endless laundry, literal and metaphorical - it takes to try to ignore the noise, smell, touch and taste of industrialised murder.

― Piedie Gimbel, 22. januar 2024 16:45 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I loved the scene where after he has sex with the girl he has to go to his own secret room in the basement to wash off. Doing wrong is a pain in the ass, takes so much work to hide it. Whether it's something banal like cheating on your wife, or something enormous like murdering 2,5 million people (according to Höss, the rest died of hunger and starvation, so technically he didn't murder them)

lol I did not realize Jonathan Glazer did that

I just want one Zone Of Interest trailer to say “from the director of Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity…”

— Matthew Schmid (@Holy_Schmid) January 12, 2024

From one of history's greatest monsters to...

and I'm not sure if I want to batter people with "YOU are capable of this too!" - but it would be a bit more interesting and maybe that's what we need

This film hit me like a brick just earlier, been wandering around in a daze. I'd argue it absolutely does this - or at least, it attacks purblind affluent complacency of all stripes. Huller's creation is almost transcendentally evil. I like that the kids don't get away with it either

I have to be careful not to come across as glib or worse here. The flash-forward near the end was good, the music over the end credits was spooky, and the part where we heard off-screen brutality was effective. But if the message is that Nazis had families, could be soft-spoken, and read to their children at bedtime, I already knew that. I just didn't connect with this as a film. I don't know how it measures up to the novel.

My understanding is that it is a *very* loose adaptation

I'm with clem. It's a film that demands pre-determined reactions.

question: were the night vision sequences meant to be dreams (höss keeps finding one of his daughters sleepwalking, talking about giving people sugar, etc) or real (one of the sons overhears someone being put to death because of a fight over an apple, presumably left by the daughter) or meant to be ambiguous

I think they're meant to be real, although I will freely admit that I did not even understand what was happening in them until I read about the movie afterwards.

Keith Harris on Zone of Interest

https://racketmn.com/the-zone-of-interest-and-origin-are-good-faith-failures

I've seen it twice now, the first time I've done that for a new release film since Nope (honorable mention to Godzilla Minus One given the b/w version that's running this week) and for the same reason -- I wanted to hear the sound design again in a theatrical setting. That may sound like a terrible reason to see a film like this again in that setting and yet it is clearly what is meant to succeed about the film to start with.

My review from last month’s uncut fwiw

THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam
Opens 2 February
Cert 12a
8/10

It’s the early 1940s and a family’s idyll is briefly imperiled: the father is promoted to a better paying job in another city and for a moment it seems like the family will be uprooted. Everyone is distraught and no one wants to leave. Fortunately better sense prevails, disaster is averted and they stay put in their blessed plot. You might recognise the story from Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland’s Meet Me in St Louis, nominally set in 1903, but filmed in 1944, and a devoutly wished fantasy of hearth and home confected for a nation sundered by war.

It’s also the plot of Jonathan Glazer’s new film about Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, and their cultivation of a charming house and garden next door to Auschwitz, the concentration camp where Rudolf is commander. The zone of interest - Das Interessengebiet - was the Nazis’ term for the restricted area around the camp, a site of much capitalist speculation - but for Glazer it’s also the incomprehensible abyss between the bucolic garden and the gas chamber.

If Glazer’s last film, the starkly stunning Under The Skin, was about the dawning of empathy and fellow feeling, The Zone of Interest is about its steadfast refusal, the concerted attempt to block out reality, even as the stench and squalor of extermination is overwhelming. The film is shot as if by disinterested surveillance cameras, neutrally documenting the family Höss as they potter about cultivating their radishes, frolicking on the banks of the river Sola, endlessly laundering their crisp white bed linen from the infernal soot of the death factory.

Under the Skin was a visionary film, but also an audio miracle, embodied in the warp and woof of Mica Levi’s score. Here the sound design - Levi again, with sound designers Johnnie Burn and Tarm Willers - is the soul of the film. The screams, screech and scrape of Auschwitz seep insidiously into the domestic interiors like spores or smoke, poisoning the picnics and soirees.

Horror is present most profoundly in their dreams. Glazer is as cavalier in his adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel - he takes not much more than the setting and the primary sources - as he was with Michel Faber in his earlier film. But the austere cinematography slips loose of the quotidian in scenes, shot with thermal imaging cameras, following a young girl cycling out of a Grimm fairytale and into the camp at night to secrete food for the starving prisoners. In the luminous inverted nocturne her strange fruit glows like Yeats’s silver apples of the moon, somehow recalling Romanian poet and prison camp survivor Paul Celan’s 1945 death camp threnody ‘Todesfugue’, with its uncanny imagery of the “black milk of daybreak”. It’s a singular, unforgettable image from modern cinema’s most lucid poet of the abyss.

xp Even though I was lukewarm on it, I actually find myself wanting to rewatch it as well, now that I have a better understanding of what the movie is up to.

FWIW (though obviously how it is shot is meant to suggest dream/fairy tale experiences at work) the girl distributing the apples is drawn from the experience of a Polish resident who the team interviewed and worked with -- supposedly both her dress and bike her character uses were her own -- and she's one of the three names thanked/memorialized in the end credits as having passed, along with Amis and one other. More on that in this long Glazer interview

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview

found this pretty devastating. the extended black screen intro with the striking score narrows our focus on the sound, the sound of the train engine prefaces the family picking through their victims clothes. the "noise" that soundtracks their daily lives is familiar to us, not its literal sound but its feeling. the cut to the museum obviously brings us back to the present, but so does the sequence of flowers settling on a red bloom that fades to a red screen until we're very aware of the fact that we're sitting in a theater bathed in red light. the horror is so massive as to be incomprehisible, but we can feel the texture of it. by depicting through abscence it avoids the othering and the moralizing that would make it easy to set it aside and it manages to be more than a lesson

Hmm. We saw this tonight, were unpersuaded. We’re big Glazer fans in this house but this didn’t really go anywhere. All of its insights are in the first 5 minutes and then it’s just saying the same thing over and over.

Very well made of course. The things that linger are some of the shots and images. My wife said, “Too much plot,” and I agree. A more impressionistic take would have had the opportunity to convey more imo.

I thought this was more widely known, but when I saw Hüller give a talk on this (and Anatomy of a Fall) at the NYFF last fall, she went into detail about how they shot inside the home of Zone of Interest which sounded marvelous: basically acting or really just being in a real space without anything that was a camera, a microphone or someone who wasn't a character (i.e. a crew member or even a director) to remind one that this was a movie production. Cameras and microphones were hidden and pretty much running all the time so that there wasn't any sense of acting to a camera position or relaxing when you knew you were off-camera. It was interesting and yet at the same time bewildering because it doesn't really feel like it had a profound impact cinematically-speaking. I was kind of wondering if anyone would feel the same way, and it looks like Richard Brody might - he already reviewed the film but he only learned about this aspect of the production today.

This is fascinating, doubly so because the technique is undetectable in the movie. https://t.co/sfR8LEWJs1

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) February 3, 2024

One wonders if Glazer merely put the actors in a position of acting as if they were on stage in a play which doesn't really translate to screen if you're not doing anything like the one-take pageant Russian Ark or the long unbroken takes of Talking to Strangers.

Should add, the crew and director were in the basement where they had monitors set up, so they were there, but out of sight.

Some movies don’t lend themselves to the YouTube movie reviewer template pic.twitter.com/JApvYYzR8d

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) February 3, 2024

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c5_BisFDBNs/maxresdefault.jpg

karl’s excellent post comes closest to conveying how i felt about this. i thought there was a lot more to consider than “damn they do be living in comfort while smokestacks next door exhale the smoke of human flesh.” and i think it’s really the nighttime scenes everyone is talk about, like the film trying to crawl out of its monolithic tone, its photonegative where someone is trying to plant fruit in the ash, in contrast with the main cast whose domestic and professional lives are entirely designed around creating more ash. a really beautiful effect that might look “ugly” or “wrong” at first, just as the daytime scenes in the movie are gorgeous but contain no beauty

I don't think I've seen many people comment on the incredibly crisp, precise visual focus of the film yet. As soon as that first river-side image hit the screen I was almost shocked at how intense it was.

I thought whatever lighting filter he used was very effective. Yeah, those very-Glazer touches were the best parts. Likewise the score. I could have done with a lot more of that. And, I don't know, picked a different family. Rudolf Hess and his wife being evil, banal or otherwise, is just too well-duh.

Likewise the score. I could have done with a lot more of that.

Glazer and Levi apparently had much more of a score for the film prepped but then felt it was better to strip a lot of it back or out entirely. I'm on board with that.

i liked this a lot. lemme just also say that i don't exactly begrudge anyone who found it boring as it's intentionally trying to provoke that reaction to some degree, so i can't really fault anyone who falls on the other side of the line

that being said, i don't actually agree w/ the idea that we're beyond the banality of evil as far as the holocaust goes. in reality, i think back on how i was taught the holocaust in schools and synagogues, and it wasn't about banality at all -- it was about grotesquely emaciated bodies, piles of corpses, a singularly evil and destructive dictator etc. we were sat down to grimly watch stuff like "the pianist." i was completely taken aback watching 'shoah' a few years ago when confronted by the actual, true banality of that film ... the degree to which the towns that housed concentration camps were -- and that point, still were -- just normal communities except for the one thing happening over there. seeing a random old polish woman explain how you had to take your donkey down that road every day like normal, but also had to hear the sounds of mass extermination, rattled me in a real way. i don't think that 'the zone of interest' is as powerful as that film, largely for obvious reasons, but i do bristle against the idea that "banality of evil" is a shallow well to be drawing from, even/especially as it relates to nazis.

so in that vein, i loved the way the hoss couple are framed as viewing essentially the entire proceedings thru the lens of upward mobility and careerism. part of what makes rudolf's final call home so shocking is that it's the only time in the film where you really hear any passion about his job (murder of jews), and even then it's a tossed off aside to the bigger news of a strategic offensive potentially bearing the family name. the scene where hedwig is taking her mother around the garden, basking in the shower of compliments, and her mother says something like "well, you've really made something of yourself" really stuck w/ me. i found that sort of grounding -- these people were literally having the same conversations as you, mapping their lives along the exact same contours -- to be particularly effective even if i can sit here and say that intuitively i understand that there were mothers who were proud of their children for advancing in the nazi party, and that those children had interior home lives of their own.

i also think setting a tone of "banality" allowed glazer to give real, genuine weight to small bits of the film that otherwise seem to come and go. for instance, the way in which the film raises the concept of how jews tried to save their possessions (the diamond in the toothpaste) made it even more hard to swallow for me. we don't see that discovery take place, the film doesn't even linger on it for a second -- but when you take a step back and think about the jew who really thought he or she was going to be able to smuggle their possessions past the nazis, or even the basic idea that a future existed at auschwitz that lasted longer than 20 minutes, the absolute heartbreaking naivety at the center of that idea... a lesser film would have made a mountain of that moment and been worse off for it, imo. it -- the theft of material goods -- is at once a minor part of the holocaust but also as devastating and disrespectful as mass death in its own way, and i think the film really deftly hits that point, not just w/ the diamond thing but even the way in which hedwig has this whole silent, twisted relationship w/ the half-used lipstick she gets to possess. you see the titillation mixing with the disgust, you see her wrestling w/ her own vanity & ideas of female respectability... there is a lot being said about society and ego in that scene... and then she just chucks the lipstick in her make up drawer and moves on with her day, as does the film itself. the object carries so much meaning but is also meaningless. i think a lesser film is not able to balance the nuance here.

the film is a feast for the eyes as you would absolutely expect from glazer, but i also felt like there was real meaning to the artiness and the opulence this time around, in a similar way to how scorcese venerates and celebrates the opulence of the osage in 'killers of the flower moon.' the bright patterns of the hoss family's wallpaper, the close-up lingering shots of blooming plants ... the meticulousness of glazer's shots & his continual insertion of color, to me, express his love of film but also his empathy for people who had their lives and possessions stolen from them. the beauty that seeps thru the cracks of this film are vestiges of the film's unseen dead, sometimes literally but more often than not metaphorically.

one thing that also felt key to me is that we never see the hoss couple experiencing much if any joy -- even in times of familial happiness we are party to the internal turmoil that is roiling their marriage. when rudolf escapes to the river for peace, his wife hunts him down and they stew silently. when rudolf fucks some random girl all we see is the grim walk down dank hallways to wash dick off. their final conversation in the film ends w/ hedwig essentially saying "your life is a nuisance to me." even when we see them laughing over some old story in bed, we're left w/ the sense that there is something off, that they don't even really share the same sense of humor. they are at once evil but also pitiful... there is never a time where either of them exhales... the film doesn't let them off the hook in this way.

lastly i thought the flip to the auschwitz musuem was really audacious -- suddenly being tossed into a world largely free of the aesthetic concerns of auteur filmmaking felt like plunging into a freezing cold lake, but the more the camera lingered on the mundane work of keeping up the museum the more i felt the burden of history, the unbreakable tethering to the past. just as there was routine work needed to keep auschwitz operational in the 1940s, the same is needed now -- for different purposes, of course, but man the film left me feeling like that was the coldest of comforts.

lastly i thought the flip to the auschwitz musuem was really audacious

First viewing through I was almost brought up short by that cut to what seemed like a distant tunnel opening. It was a quiet bit of weird silent horror.

Some good posts. It's been too many years for me to recall Birth with any clarity, and now that Criterion Channel's got a Glazerthon I'll re-watch it. I do remember Under the Skin well enough; it struck me at the time as high-toned schlock but I may need to give it another shot too. Maybe Glazer and I aren't simpatico.

Anyone watched his new short on the Criterion Channel?

I don't really disagree with anything in yr post, Jordan. I think it did all of that, with some originality and intentionality that was suited to the subject matter — I thought the movie was a fair effort, it doesn't trivialize anything, it understands and respects the gravity of its material. I just really didn't feel like it had anything new to say? Again, I think the narrative choice to focus on Rudolf Hess — however lightly fictionalized — just boxes it in. Much more interesting and damning to me would have been similar depictions of other lives, lives a little more removed from actually running the machinery of the Holocaust. I guess what I mean is, of course the Hesses were villains. Rudolf Hess was such a villain that he was convicted at Nuremberg and promptly hanged. But what about people who just lived nearby and worked in shops or factories, who noticed ashes falling on their clothes on the clotheslines or whatever. In a way, I don't think the movie does enough to indict the complicity of the entire society, because it's focused on the obviously evil leadership.

But what about people who just lived nearby and worked in shops or factories, who noticed ashes falling on their clothes on the clotheslines or whatever.

Although set in the years before WWI, Haneke's The White Ribbon iirc explores collective culpability.

And I still haven't seen that, becz Haneke mostly annoys me, but maybe I should.

I didn't care for it but give it a shot.

it struck me at the time as high-toned schlock

not sure i get this alfred, nothing about under the skin reads as schlocky to me other than it’s genre fiction or whatever. i think it’s one of the more harrowing and heartbreaking studies of otherness ever made, of longing to be normal but knowing you’ve been made wrong, that your very existence destabilizes and annihilates the “normal” (i’m projecting but it is also very very trans imo). it’s funny, both it and zone of interest are movies about alienation, but zone is observing it through the other end of the telescope, i.e. these are people who have alienated themselves from any human impulse, on purpose, because they want it that way. it will be much harder for me to revisit as a result but in the end it may be the more difficult and impressive work

incidentally under the skin was another instance of glazer gutting the source material to the bare minimum and renovating whatever’s left to his own designs, which is something i generally approve of in adaptations (especially in the zone of interest’s case, not an amis fan)

Yeah, I'm with Ivy, I thought "Under the Skin" pretty profound in an original way.

I thought this one was really spooky and disquieting, like a documentary about a haunted house where the ghosts all silently know they have cancer. And yeah, the use of sound and music was incredible. Any good interviews or features on that worth linking?

I remember hearing that some of the people in under the skin were just random people they loosed scarjo on, so there is a kind of subliminal borat vibe to it that could read as schlocky.

Funny how Berlin school aesthetics have graduated to Oscar bait now. Felt like hoss-era Petzold. Challenging enough in the context of the big release awards films but a weird pastiche. I didn't even learn anything new about the Nazis!

Sandra huller was fun, limping around as an evil haus frau

Was missing Morbs. mucho yesterday because he could back up his zingers with substance with the added plus that they were usually funny

It doesn't care to do anything else beyond showing us the furniture.

I think the problem is you actually watched a different film.

Please to avoid a pile-on, I was hoping xyzzzz would have more to say about why he disliked it

Generally felt that the main characters had much more going on than your average Kubrick film; I enjoy Kubrick but didn’t feel much similarities here aside from some cinematography choices

Sorry. Hopefully you can draw him out of his shell.

I guess I've seen xyzzzz pull this often enough that I know a more thoughtful take isn't forthcoming.

I just have no patience for the whiff of superiority in posts like:

Knew I should've trusted my judgement and not seen this.

previous Kubrick blaming I have read on here is that he created the space for a wasteman like Nolan to exist in. I always thought that was an unfair criticism because for starters all Nolan movies are rank garbage and not fit to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Barry Lyndon or Paths of Glory. And I can't even be bothered thinking about the rest because I quite like Kubrick, apart from a few of his overrated stinkers - he was pretty damned good!

Aside from just remembering something about Kubrick having a script for an unrealized holocaust movie. I didn't think much about him while watching TZoI.

you could say he was outside your zone of interest

A little "you're no fun anymore" creeping in here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6mlQu83XTQ

There is something Kubrickian in its cold-eyed detachment, although I think Glazer complicates that detachment multiple times. Kubrick makes more sense to me as a reference point than "slow cinema," which I didn't really see or feel this film as part of.

As a not-particular-fan of the film, I share some of Brody's issues but I also think he goes way overboard. I don't think "kitsch" really applies here conceptually at all. Anthony Lane's review, which is more middling is somewhat closer to my own feelings about it: "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?"

I realize that most of these criticisms including mine proceed from the position of, "He could have made a different/better film about the same thing." And that wishing for a different movie doesn't do anything about the one we have. But, you know, wishing for a better version of the same thing is the right of any filmgoer.

Was missing Morbs. mucho yesterday because he could back up his zingers with substance with the added plus that they were usually funny

― Make Me Smile (Come Around and See Me) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Kinda fucked up to say things like this. Morbs is dead, what are you attempting here with your silly comparison?

I also thought this movie was nothing. I feel like I got no extra out of watching it than I already understood from a few brief synopses I had read prior.

I am pulling nothing. I did not like this film, for a very clear easy to read reason. If you are struggling with this, that isn't my fault.

Just very flatly conceptual. I recently scanned past an article about the woman it was based on where she was wearing the same dress and had the ugly Hummel figurine version of 90s bjork hairdo which was very of course. As a movie it had 'a point' and it 'illustrated' that point. I thought the Oscar speech was much better than the film.

I am pulling nothing. I did not like this film, for a very clear easy to read reason. If you are struggling with this, that isn't my fault.

I think the Kubrick comparison is rude to Kubrick, not because I love him but because there's a situating of the viewer in Kubrick's films that give them a form that is discursive. You experience the meaning in some way, there's an effort to make this possible. I detected no counterpart here. This film wasn't Kubrick it was Petzold but with a message. For me personally this was too glib.

Kubrick isn't the only director who used spaces and detachment.

No.

I blame Chantal Ackerman

Or Chantal Akerman even

Who is with Morbius now, checking out the Kim’s Video branch in Heaven.

Well one of the things that makes Glazer interesting is that whatever roots you can see, he’s always felt aesthetically distinct. You can see it even in his TV ads. So any comparison will go so far. What this mostly felt like to me is a Glazer film.

Isn’t there some kind of Comic Book Guy/Mensa board you can go to where they appreciate your sort of genius?
― Make Me Smile (Come Around and See Me) (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

At least I stopped you from posting those YouTube links

If you are all wondering why James is mad...

Hahaha I just posted one this morning on another thread you soiled with one of your “insights.”

I think the Kubrick comparison is rude to Kubrick, not because I love him but because there's a situating of the viewer in Kubrick's films that give them a form that is discursive. You experience the meaning in some way, there's an effort to make this possible. I detected no counterpart here. This film wasn't Kubrick it was Petzold but with a message. For me personally this was too glib.

― plax (ico), Monday, 1 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Hmm do you mean the last few Petzold films here?

The Glazer seemed like very well researched and relentless with the way it's put together in terms of settings and scenes and it's sound of plops and scream.

I think it's fine to disagree on the merits of this film. The important thing is for us all to be having a good time online.

Googling "Mensa msg board" is how I get my kicks online.

I don't know if anyone needs Corey Robin's take, but fwiw

Finally saw Zone of Interest. It was meh, but one thing it does well— not seen in many other Holocaust films—is show how much the Nazis saw themselves as settler colonists in the East. You can see why Glazer made the speech he did at the Oscars. The movie is not simply about the

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) March 31, 2024

Thinking back on the parts of the movie that retained any of Levi’s score, I realised that it blasts in in contexts where the Holocaust IS acknowledged - the Stygian hellscapes with the girl hiding apples for the prisoners was the inverse, visually and sonically, of the rest of the film. We’re switching from absence to overwhelming, unbearable presence and so does the score. The flare-outs to white and red likewise.

“hellscape”, sorry

Man I love how Brody is trying to make it better. You are not a filmmaker.

This is a pretty normal thing for a film critic to do--point out what you don't like, and elaborate via some alternate way of doing it. I don't think it suggests pretensions to being a filmmaker.

Don't often see that. Brody suggested a pretty different film that would depend on several other factors for a successful execution.

"previous Kubrick blaming I have read on here is that he created the space for a wasteman like Nolan to exist in."

Yeah that's bollocks but it sounds like the points of comparisons would be how indulged they are by studios to make anything they like. The filmmaking is different though it's superficially epic at times.

the petzold comparison i had in mind was more to the films he made with Hoss, in particular the last (historical) ones: Barbara, Phoenix. Certainly this film seemed to me to have a self-consciously Berlin -school type aesthetic (jostling flatness, valent banality, a fairly humourless 'critical' mode) but with more bombastic final delivery and very straightforward 'message'. The first time I saw phoenix it hit me hard but in retrospect it feels very on the nose. its possible however that my negative reaction is partly due to not reading the booking page properly and seeing it in screen 2 at the ICA, which I hate, as I would have gone somewhere else had I realised it wasn't being shown on the main screen.

I'm surprised here that I'm actually familiar with Petzold's movies and have seen a few of them -just not familiar with his name.

my post is appallingly written and it seems like the last comment about screens is about the movie phoenix but is supposed to be about zone of interest.

I remember liking Phoenix at the time but I don't remember enough here to properly compare.

I think you might like some of his films, Calzino.

xps

I've seen Phoenix and Barbera and possibly one more, my memory is a bit foggy on them but Phoenix I completely recall because at the time I was massively into Rossellini's war trilogy and was drawn to any movie set in postwar Berlin.

I like the phrase "valent banality." How does it apply to Barbara?

Nina Hoss has a good part in the latest Radu Jude film

Barbara is not quite Ostalgie, but definitively taps into a similar vibe.

https://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169134837/in-barbara-a-new-look-at-life-behind-the-wall
Hadn’t realized Petzold was East German himself, d’oh!

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/go-east

my post is appallingly written and it seems like the last comment about screens is about the movie phoenix but is supposed to be about zone of interest.

― plax (ico), Tuesday, 2 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Would be funny if all it took to flip your opinion would be to see this at ICA screen one.

https://deadline.com/2024/04/joaquin-phoenix-joel-coen-todd-haynes-jonathan-glazers-oscar-speech-open-letter-1235876708/

150 signatories from the arts supporting Glazer's Oscar speech. Proud to see so many colleagues, friends, former bosses as signatories.

We are proud Jews who denounce the weaponization of Jewish identity and the memory of the Holocaust to justify what many experts in international law, including leading Holocaust scholars, have identified as a “genocide in the making.” We reject the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom. We stand with all those calling for a permanent ceasefire, including the safe return of all hostages and the immediate delivery of aid into Gaza, and an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of and siege on Gaza.

Good to see.

I watched this last night. I'd say it's one of the more memorable contemporary films I've seen in a long while. It's hard to shake many sequences, sounds and images from memory. I think it's a masterpiece and one of the great horror films.

A materialist reading of the film.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/staging-genocide-zone-of-interest

Provocative and interesting thanks - articulated several things I strongly feel about the film, in ways I hadn’t been able to express clearly.