Zone of Interest begins, for a seemingly inordinate length of time, with a black screen and a formless drone music. But when the music stops and the screen clears we are in an idyllic setting: trees, bushes, a sparkling clear stream in the middle ground, and in the middle of all this green a small group of people mostly in white. Their whiteness, and the fact that they are people, makes us focus on the group. But we don’t go close, we can’t really make out what they are doing, we can’t hear what they are saying. Perhaps a family group, a picnic? Someone is splashing in the river, some of the men seem to be preparing to swim, the women and the youngest children are gathering things together and heading off towards the left. When the camera finally drifts away from this scene we see what seems to be the entire group making their way through dense undergrowth. Yet still we are not close to these people, still we are not required to pay attention to anything they might be saying. We guess, and it will soon be confirmed, that among this group are the central figures of this film, but we can’t identify them with any certainty. Indeed, if this opening tells us anything, it is that these people are unimportant, that we should not pay too much attention to them.
Rather, what struck me about this opening was the colour. The whiteness of the people is supposed to be symbolic of purity, but that is not how I interpreted it. Because the people are diminished by the setting in which we see them, and that setting is green. Indeed it is impossible to count how many shades of green are displayed by this crowd of trees and bushes. And green is the colour of life, of freshness, of rebirth. Against that backcloth, the people are not white but colourless, a gap, an emptiness in this profusion of life and growth. I already knew, from the posters for the film, how visually important the green lawn up against the wall of the camp was. Green: we never see inside the camp (other than the anonymous roofs of a few buildings and, of course, the chimneys), but I will lay odds that green is not a colour that was seen much inside the camp. This opening emphasis on green, therefore, is potent precisely because it makes us pay attention to absence, to what is not being shown in the film.
And this is a film that is all about what is not on the screen.
The other thing that this opening tells us about how to watch the film is also referred to above, when I say that we are not required to pay attention to what the characters say. There is, so far as I remember, no major element in the film revealed through dialogue. In fact the sheer banality of most of what is said is a large part of the point of the film. Writing about Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt talked of the banality of evil, and this film, concentrating on someone a few rungs lower down the extermination ladder, seems like a literalization of that perception. We see a prisoner deliver a large black bag to the house; it is taken off him wordlessly, no thank you, nothing, his presence is not acknowledged. There is a local Polish girl who works as a servant in the house, again she never receives a thank you, in fact practically the only time she is spoken to is when she is admonished. They live in a silence that excludes everything around them, except there is no silence, as I will mention later.
The house is quite large, fitting for their status, but in terms of decor and furnishings it is nothing special, a rather dull suburban home because these are rather dull suburban people. Only its location makes it special. The bag that the prisoner delivered contains a selection of clothes which the lady of the house and her close friends share out between them; a stylish gown, a long fur coat. These have presumably been confiscated from new arrivals at the camp; everything that these people have to give them an appearance of glamour or stylishness is stolen from the prisoners. The fur coat has a ripped seam that will need to be repaired, presumably where its original owner tried to secrete some valuables.
The woman is Hedwig Höss, the wife of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. They are dull, ordinary people with nothing of interest to say. They owe their position to Rudolf’s willingness to carry out the ruthless dictates of the regime without anything that comes close to a qualm. Their house, with its garden tended by anonymous prisoners, its lawn and pool, are all that really matter to them. When Rudolf is transferred to Oranienburg outside Berlin, Hedwig chooses to stay at Auschwitz because she values the house and, presumably, the status it confers. It is said that one of the reasons Höss was transferred is because he was having an affair with one of the communist prisoners. This is alluded to when we see a drab-looking girl in prison uniform come into his office and begin to take off her shoes, then later Höss goes to a washroom and very carefully begins to clean his genitals. But the film makes no explicit link between this incident and the transfer. Höss is, if anything, more alive when we see him talking to a couple of engineers about a new design of the crematorium which would allow the ovens to be in constant operation.
Mostly, what we see is everyday stuff with nothing of any import happening. Officers gather to wish Höss a happy birthday. Höss rides the few yards from his home to the camp upon his beloved horse. Hedwig’s mother comes to visit, and wonders whether one of the camp inmates is a posh Jewish woman she used to know and didn’t like. Children play in the garden and pool. Höss goes fishing in the river. The dialogue is as everyday as the events we witness. But that is not where our interest lies. Because although we see nothing of the camp beyond the upper stories of a couple of nondescript buildings, and smoke rising from a couple of chimneys, the camp is ever present, and it is the noise of the unseen camp that is the focal point of the film. Always present but never acknowledged, there is shouting, screams, gunshots, and various other noises. These are indistinct, when there is shouting we can never tell what is being shouted, but it never goes away. It settles over the tidy suburban life of the household just as, we imagine, ash from the constantly belching chimneys settles over the washing hung out on the line. When Hedwig’s mother visits, she wakes in the night to noises that sound louder and more threatening than ever (I thought for a moment that it was the sound of battle, but the internal chronology means this must have been the summer of 1943, far too early for Russian forces to have started approaching Auschwitz). In the morning, she has left before anyone else in the household has risen. This is the only acknowledgement in the film that anyone in the household is even aware of the immediate, looming presence of the camp. What we see in the film is people choosing to ignore; what we hear on the soundtrack is what they are ignoring.
One final point: the film takes its title from a novel by Martin Amis, but it is not the film of the novel. I dislike Amis’s writing, so I haven’t read the book and probably never will. But I checked it out when I knew I was going to see the film. Amis does not use the real names of Höss or his family, and the novel concerns a fictional affair between Hedwig and another officer. None of this appears in the film; so far as I can see, only the setting and the title derive from the novel.
And the film spells nothing out. There is, towards the end, a brief glimpse of women cleaning exhibits in the Auschwitz Museum, but otherwise there is no reference to after the war. The household right against the wall of the camp is the entire universe, without beginning or end. We learn, only after returning home to do some research, that Rudolf Höss was hung in 1947, that Hedwig lived into her 80s, that their youngest child, seen only as a baby in the film, has publicly bemoaned the fact that modern Germans cannot celebrate Nazism. Perhaps there is no end, perhaps there is no after.
Through the dark labyrinth 