Jonathan Glazer\u2019s approach to the Holocaust is a terrifying exercise in cinematic minimalism. Although I haven\u2019t read it, it seems that he has taken Martin Amis\u2019s novel about Auschwitz CEO Rudolph H\u00f6ss, stripped it off almost everything resembling a plot, and then shot it with fly-on-the-wall cameras. The result is very much a one-trick film \u2013 but it\u2019s one hell of a good trick. As we watch the bourgeois 1940s German family playing with their kids, entertaining friends and relatives, tending the garden, splashing in the pool, the soundtrack never ceases to be filled with the ghastly sounds of the final solution emanating from the camp next door to their middle-class paradise.<\/p>\n
Although the goings-on at the death camps are rarely evoked in dialogue, this is not a tale of people blithely looking the other way. They know exactly what is happening, it just isn\u2019t relevant to their day-to-day interests. Yes, the presence of human remains near where his children are playing is enough for an underling to earn a telling-off from H\u00f6ss, but otherwise the tragedy and brutal evil of the Nazi purge happens in the corners and off-screen.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an element of absurdity in the way that the family refuse to acknowledge the sounds and sights of death and terror right on their doorstep \u2013 almost like something out of The Bed Sitting Room<\/em> or Synecdoche, New York<\/em> \u2013 until you remember that all of this was real, that Auschwitz happened and that the H\u00f6ss family were real people. That isn\u2019t to say there\u2019s no artistic licence here. The real Auschwitz was a little further away from the H\u00f6ss garden, I understand, so the absurdity is partly Glazer\u2019s doing, but this is a matter of degree more than anything else.<\/p>\n Something barely resembling a story crops up after about an hour when H\u00f6ss is transferred and his wife Hedwig (Sandra H\u00fcller from Anatomy of a Fall<\/em>) refuses to uproot herself and her children, but otherwise this is all Glazer\u2019s Kubrickian detachments from the unholy terrors happening at the edges, with \u0141ukasz \u017bal\u2019s cinematography giving the sunny days an overlit, almost nuclear, whiteness, and the winter months a cool blue blanket.<\/p>\n Rating this film is something of a struggle for me. I don\u2019t want to see it again, I note the excellent performances, and admire the rigour of the form, but I felt overwhelmed by it, rather than drawn in. That may be what Glazer intended, but it doesn\u2019t make this a film I\u2019m likely to recommend to friends and family. And I felt that restraint slip in the phone call where H\u00f6ss talks to Hedwig about (theoretically) how to gas a ballroom of partygoers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jonathan Glazer\u2019s approach to the Holocaust is a terrifying exercise in cinematic minimalism. Although I haven\u2019t read it, it seems that he has taken Martin Amis\u2019s novel about Auschwitz CEO Rudolph H\u00f6ss, stripped it off almost everything resembling a plot, and then shot it with fly-on-the-wall cameras. The result is very much a one-trick film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,19],"class_list":["post-3740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Yk","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3741,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740\/revisions\/3741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}