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Reviewing Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning movie, The Zone of Interest, brings about an immediate encounter with the central issue raised in the film. Where will the reader's gaze be directed? What to leave out, unrepresented or not shown? What to bring to the foreground and what to leave to the imagination? How much can we bear to see? Is there some relief in allowing ourselves to be distracted, our gaze led away from central to marginal? And even: can the heart of the dark really be best comprehended when we allow our gaze to take in some truth in fragmented shards as they refract back towards us, glancing off the peripheral? By focusing on some of these fragments, do I also become complicit in averting the readers’ gaze from where it must surely go? Away from the true, unspoken, unspeakable horrors which are heard but remain unseen on screen, outside our field of vision?
In the movie theatre we settle into our seats, the lights go out and … for quite some time the screen remains blank. We are haunted and disturbed by Mica Levi's original soundscape and we are stuck together with our fellow cinema-goers, blind and unknowing. We sit unseeing. We dare not look away. How long is this going to go on for? What is behind the screen/wall? What's on the other side? We have arrived in the land of staring with unseeing eyes. It's not comfortable. It isn't meant to be.
When finally the screen opens up, it is as much a relief as it is jarring. We see a summer idyll, a riverside family picnic. We clearly and immediately see the full bodily outline of the man. This man, the swimming-trunks-clad paterfamilias. Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, seen in Sunday repose. A most ordinary man of flesh and blood on full display in un-self-conscious near nakedness.
The film, when premiered, divided critics almost as much as its director, Glazer, divided opinion later, with his eventual, perhaps unavoidably politicised, Oscar acceptance speech at the Academy Awards.
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