“For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Walter Benjamin

1. Some images have the voltage to open up forwards and backwards in time. Perhaps they are the stones thrown by Exu. First, a diagonal shot reveals a cold hall where Commander Rudolf Höss appears to vomit something that is consuming his body from within. There is a cut, and we see the reverse shot of this same space; these shot-reverse shot plays are something the film has used exhaustively until this moment to produce the spatiality of domestic spaces. In the reverse shot, already with his body raised, Höss suddenly becomes aware he is being observed. He gazes at us. Us, the cinema theatre: the dark and submerged hole of History. The forwards and backwards image unfolds like a sheet of paper. Because we must bear in mind that even when the films depict past events, the time period in which they encounter our gaze is always our own. Thus, what we are looking at is inevitably the present time, even if we are being artificially transported back to the diegetic past of history. In The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, the gesture of breaking with this artifice of immersion into another time is central to the film’s endeavor. Höss looks at us, we who are the present of History. And what is given to us to see from this fracture in time is the Holocaust Museum.

2. In the Holocaust Museum, today, the film reveals a cleansing ritual. The floor is swept, glass is cleaned, dust is vacuumed. Must History be cleaned, or cleared up? Or, even more pointedly to what the film is proposing: how do you sanitize horror?

“Silence has gossiping walls, emptiness slandering emptiness. Silence has the sound of darkness that oozes and spills with the awe of an army in secret locations. Silence has the whispering sound of a sense eyeing, between sleep and wakefulness, the task of another sense. Silence is a garrulous stuttering among elements that have not yet mastered speech. Silence is the laughter of a storm that reaches us after having successfully completed its absurd task. Silence is a humming that turns the bedroom into a thicket of ghosts.” Mahmud Darwich

3. Lucrecia Martel often says that, to her, the experience of being in a movie theatre is equivalent to diving into the sound density of a pool. When all around is volume and, from down in the deep, submerged, we watch what happens between the edges of the surface of that rectangular screen, the sound of the film becomes the liquid measure that enables the movement of our bodies within the movie theatre. The sound design in The Zone of Interest, signed by Johnnie Burn, completely froze my body. The sound of the film’s nocturnal preface – a strange symphony that gradually emits noises that seem to be human interventions on space slowly melding with the chirping of birds in the grass – the guttural sound that children let out at night because they cannot sleep (no one can sleep in that house), the metallic sound that imposes itself over the negative image of a girl planting apples in the muck, the sound of the vacuum cleaner of the present that traverses time and reaches the image of Commander Höss in the past, the sound of screams and shots far at the back of the house’s windows, the sound of trains, the sound of chimneys. But of all the sounds, there is one that makes me sink deeper into this murky pool: when the “queen of Auschwitz” proudly shows her garden and vegetable patch to her newly arrived mother, her voice hits the wall next to her and bounces back. There is a subtle echo of this encounter. The wall next door separates the garden of azaleas and sunflowers from the most absolute horror. The echo projected in the voices of both characters at that moment is the sound reverberation of the  storms of history.

4. I think about how contemporary Palestinian cinema has dedicated itself to sound. The high-pitched sound of Israel’s armed drones in Ouroboros by Basma al-Sharif, the sound of synthetic trance in In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain by Larissa Sansour, the special microphones used to capture sound within the walls in Recollection by Kamal Aljafari.

“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].” Walter Benjamin

5. In the sanitization of horror, the sound echoing in the Höss family garden is the production of a historical body that traverses walls and adheres to a time/space saturated with ‘nows’. Just like ghosts.

6. When she finds out that her husband will be transferred to another place, the “queen of Auschwitz” argues that she will not leave there. “This is our lebensraum,” she says, “the lebensraum that Hitler dreamed for the German people.” In the English translation, the expression remained as “living space.” In the Portuguese subtitle, it is translated as “espaço vital” (vital space). But lebensraum is a nationalist word. The German vital space referred to originally came forth within the context of the turn of the century and became a fundamental Nazi government program to justify the expansion of the “Aryan race” throughout European territories. The dialogue between this, the driving force behind the blooms of that lebensraum, and he, simultaneously attentive father and army officer who looks at spaces, machine-like, to understand the amount of gas necessary to kill those inside, takes place in front of a nearby river. Rivers, like trains – another strong background presence in the film -, often function as figures invoked to speak of cinema itself: as forces of intermittent flux, images in constant motion towards the unknown. They discuss the dreamed vital space as a political project, in this case, the Nazi project, in front of the moving waters of a river which, the film leads us to infer at some point, carries the remains of charred bodies. The shock effect – the life and death in and of the river, the life and death in and of the house, life and death in and of the children’s play, the presence of life in the negative image of the girl planting apples in the mud and the latent presence of death in the flowers’ bright colors – is entirely intended to be subtle, almost imperceptible. Much like echoes in a garden.

7. The “queen of Auschwitz” tries on a fur coat and red lipstick, left behind by Jews killed by the Nazi regime. Through the keyhole of history, an Israeli soldier proudly displays to the camera a pair of women’s shoes worn at a wedding party in Gaza. When will ghosts come to claim their objects back?

8. Commander Höss walks through the house at night. He enters and exits the rooms, turning off the lights. The various cameras used by the film for the concrete production of this space within us follow this flow of entering and leaving the rooms with a precision that is as mechanical as the calculations for the construction of gas chambers. Höss’s gestures are automated. I am reminded of Jeanne Dielman, teaching us about the robotization of domestic spaces. In this case, this robotization extends beyond this space and plants its blood-soaked boots in the terrain of history (if you blink, you will miss the image, Glazer shoots it very fast with an overhead camera right at the beginning of the film). At night, no one can really sleep in this house. Turning off the lights is of no use. There is always the light, and the sound of a chimney outside, which do not ask for permission to come in, but come in they do.

“We had no need for myths back then, but what happened in them is now happening to us… On this day that is being crushed under the chains of a tank. Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth. The myth that could not find a single one among us to testify that the crime had not taken place. If we are not we, then they are not they. But particulars are particulars – the thief’s pretext.” Mahmud Darwich

9. Traditional children’s tales are often populated with extreme violence as childhood’s first encounter with notions of the radicality of living. In Glazer’s film, this is used to flirt with something that had already been constructed in some of his previous films: the full immersion in artificial images that make this violence even more acute in its displacement from a realistic regime. The fairy-tale of Hansel and Gretel is filled with these elements: two poor children find a candy house, but quickly discover that its owner is a witch who wants to devour them. There is greed (not only that of the witch, but also that of the children), there is cannibalism, and there is, as Commander Höss gracefully tells his daughters, the witch burned alive in the end. Any attempt to produce poetic realism from these images tends to be abject, as Rivette would remind us.

10. And perhaps for this reason, that image of the teeth with which the children play at night was not necessary for a film whose great strength lies in revealing violence from what cannot be apprehended through its concrete visuality.

11. While the commander tells us horror stories to lull us to sleep, we see, in the artificiality of the supposedly negative image, the girl planting apples in the sludge. Apples that could be the last meal for those condemned to the concentration camp. At a certain moment, she returns home. She and her family speak different languages. Everything outside this house is in the inverted black and white of the image. Everything inside has colours. In this game of filming what is inside and outside of this other space of the film, arises some vertigo understanding that, right in the middle of the terrain of history, there are always enclaves of resistance, and that enclaves often need another image system to exist without being seen.

12. In the short film A Sketch of Manners by Palestinian filmmaker Jumana Manna, there is a fictional reenactment of an archival photograph from bohemian Palestine in April 1942. In Jerusalem, a group of friends gets dressed up and puts on makeup to pose for a photo. Out there, in a not-so-distant Europe, a war is destroying everything in its path. Concentration camps are being erected. But “Palestine is far from this war. While the rest of the world seemed to be committing suicide, Alfred Roch was hosting what would be the last masquerade in Palestine.” There was an elite there signing agreements with British colonial forces that would soon take over that territory in the name of creating the state of Israel, European guilt producing new forms of colonialism. The tableau vivant produced by this short film from this photo is a monad of history.

“Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad.” Walter Benjamin

13. The completely dark screens of the intro and end of the film. The darkness of the corridors of history. The entirely red screen of the film. The red garden. But beyond these screens, there is another fundamental intervention that attempts to break the flux of the train, the river, and the cinema, even before Höss looks through the keyhole of time. This intervention occurs when we see the lyrics of a song appear as text supporting the images. The girl with the apples plays notes on a piano. Over each of them, the verses: “Sunbeams/ radiant and warm/Human bodies/ young and old/ And who are imprisoned here/ Our hearts are yet not cold/ We who are imprisoned here/Are wakeful as the stars at night/Souls afire, like the blazing sun/Tearing, breaking through their pain/For soon we’ll see that waving flag/The flag of freedom yet to come”. Strictly speaking, the words printed on the screen over each of these musical notes do not produce echoes. And that is why the piano exists in here. So that the words are always read with the texture of an aesthetic experience saturated with tensions, because every aesthetic experience is a political one.

14. The diegetic guttural sounds of the children, the extra-diegetic guttural sounds of the soundtrack. Höss’s medical consultation and his attempt to vomit. There is something inside there which consumes people and History. We are dealing with a film with entrails glimpsed in long shots.

15. In December 2023, over two months after Israel’s genocidal offensive began in the Gaza Strip (but not only there), German actress Sandra Hüller, who portrays the “queen of Auschwitz” like no one else (the character’s laughter at night burns on our skin), took to the stage of the European Film Awards to receive the award for best actress for another film in which she also had a poignant performance, Anatomy of a Fall. On stage, Hüller’s voice trembled. And she asked for a minute of silence for… “peace”. The word “peace” in this context of a massacre justified under the code of “the right to self-defense” of a state that has been promoting apartheid for decades, did not sit well with those who understand the weight of what ethnic genocide means. Whether of Jews or Palestinians. “Peace” is a white word. But the initial and final screens of The Zone of Interest, thankfully, are dark.

16. Sandra Hüller, and here it is not her talent that is under question, but rather her political gesture, is a symptom of a very concrete persecution by German cultural institutions against any pro-Palestinian expression. “Peace” makes tanks equal to stones. “Peace” as opposite to a “War” that has never existed. For what exists there even before 1948 is a massacre. “Peace” was the tasteless and sanitized texture (the vacuum cleaner in the Holocaust Museum) of Berlinale’s last edition, a film festival that will remain etched in the corridors of history for its officials’ attempt to depoliticize cinema. Few crimes are as cruel.

17. But director Jonathan Glazer, himself Jewish, took to the stage at the Oscars in March 2024 to make the necessary equivalences: the dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust reverberates in the dehumanization of Palestinians. I would add it is a dehumanization of Palestinians in Palestine occupied by the Zionist and terrorist state of Israel. Meanwhile… IDF soldiers play with the bicycles of dead children.

18. Within the film, the monad: Commander Höss gazes at us, we, the present of History, in the reverse shot of time. And what is shown to us from this temporal fracture is Palestine. Today.

P.S.: prompted by a first reaction to this text, I think of Godard, and of the film that he generously left for us to fill with other images: “Je vous salue, Palestine.”