“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?