Horror Without Seeing Horror

 The Zone of Interest (2023) focus on a life of a German family that happens to belong to one of most effective mass murdered of the Third Reich, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (1901 – 1947). There has been a movie about him earlier Aus Einem deutchen Leben (1977) with suberb Götz George playing the leading role.

This movie, however is about the family that lives right next to Auschwitz camp, so close that the wall that surrounds family's idyllic art–deco house and its garden, allows us to see the upper parts of the consentration camp, watchtower with a guards pacing inside it and occasionally at night time we see a chimney of a crematorium spew red flames. Camera's are positioned still or move slowly on a dolly, thus making view like we are bystanders on their garden, the camp and its horrors looming above one-third's of focal plane.

That is exactly what this movie is about. Not seeing things that we already know. And because we know too damn well what is happening on the other side of the wall makes watching the happy family life so banal to us. We see Rudolf Höss, played by singer and actor Christian Friedel (Elser, Babylon Berlin) only doing his work at the phone or on the conference room, and observing daily horrors of the camp, and even then the we only see his face. The family is totally ignorant about the horrors behind the wall, they don't ever mention about those. He knows exactly what is happening, his wife doesn't care and children only suspect. See no evil, speak no evil.

But they and we hear evil. There are shouts and gunfire. Industrial level of extermination makes noise. We only see some selected Jews tending house and garden. One of them spreads ash on a garden... is it human? Once Rudolf and his son's idyllic river trip is interrupted by a flow of grey ash.  

At the end of movie, we see Auschwitz as it is today, as a museum where workers are vacuming and cleaning places for visitor's. According to film critic A.A. Dowd this means that the camp is still a place of work, albeit being a place of conservation instead of destruction. We don't watch these kind of movies to enjoy, we watch them to remind us for evil that can make itself look like it isn't evil at all. 

Never forget!

Film4 Productions ©

 

Spielberg and Unintentional/Intentional Punctum

 The very concept of Roland Barthes' studium and punctum  in photography is a hard thing to understand, however when someone gives you a good examples about those, you get the picture (no pun intented).Is struggled my time to comprehend those terms when I was studying art history in university, before I got enough of that brainwashing (nobody should tell what kind of art you suppose to like).

If you google those terms, this is what you get:

Studium describes elements of an image rather than the sum of the image's information and meaning. The punctum of a photograph, however, contains a deeper dimension: the elements of punctum penetrate the studium—they have the ability to move the viewer in a deep and emotional way.

Lots of words after words. You can learn it by heart and spill it out on examination paper and get full points without understanding it's meaning.

However there is a movie that is full of studium and punctum, and that is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List from 1993. 

Movie is black and white which is (on my opinion) the first punctum. Seeing a grey person in colour photograph or movie is a punctum, and so is seeing people murdered in peaceful world. Yet the world in the movie is not peaceful and murder and violence is always present. Thus the studium, the very atmosphere of the world has turned entirely so much full of punctum that it has turned to studium, thus the world is black and white because that is pointing to the status quo of the war and holocaust

At one point of the movie you can see a group of jews, driven out of their ghetto, walking towards their imminent deaths. Another sight of that studium situation. Then comes something that is punctum at it's purest form, something that irritates the viewer emotionally: A girl whose coat is not grey but visibly red. Seeing of those other people walking to their deaths is not very much shocking on a movie like this, seeing that little girl that is separated visually from other victims is. And later we can see that same coat on the middle of a giant pyre. Gassed and burned.

Still from Schindler's List (1993), Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures.

At the end of the movie, the real people whom Oscar Schindler's actions save, accompanied by the actors, gather to commemorate him on he's grave. Time is now early 1990s, war has ended, the world is coloured again. 

I don't know if this was intentional use of studium and punctum from Spielberg, most probably it was. However these terms were coined in early 1980s by Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire (1980). Yet one can spot so many punctums from lots of photographs and movies before that, Barthes was just givng a name to a phenomena. And Spielberg managed to give us a message by this. We must never forget.