Oscar: how “Zone of Interest” talks about the Holocaust without scenes of violence

“Zone of Interest” the historical drama of Jonathan Glazer nominated for an Oscar, it is technically a film about the Holocaust.

The plot centers on the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family, who live a bucolic and seemingly mundane life next to the concentration camp. But viewers never see the horrors happening on the other side of the garden wall. Instead, they listen to them. They hear them in the muffled screams, the wails, and the piercing gunshots. They hear them in the distant sounds of trains and the constant hum of the incinerator.

“I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to reenact these atrocities using actors and extras,” director Glazer told CNN in an interview in February.

“I feel like this image is something that we all know and is burned into our consciousness just as it is. Sound, of course, is interpretive. We are able to see these images in our mind because we hear these sounds.”

The sound design in “Zona de Interesse” is a kind of main character. In interviews, Glazer said the title consists of two films: “the one you see and the one you hear.”

These ambient noises are an ever-present, stomach-churning reminder of the evil the Höss faces and the family is complicit in. They signal to the audience that Höss, his wife Hedwig and even their children are perfectly aware that millions of Jews are being murdered day after day – they have just managed to ignore it.

“In other words, it’s out of sight, but never out of mind,” Glazer told CNN .

Constructing a sound representation of the Holocaust, however, was not a simple task. The sound designer Johnny Burn who also worked on “Poor Creatures” It is “No! Do not look” compiled 600 pages of research into the sounds that would have been heard in the death camp during World War II, wrote Sarah Shachat of IndieWire in an article titled “How ‘Zone Zone’ Uses Our Ears Like No Other Movie.”

This included everything from planes, trains and automobiles of the time to testimonies from survivors describing what was happening inside the camp. Burn has said in interviews that he spent a year gathering the audio that makes up the film's chilling undercurrent.

The effort required a lot of creativity — rather than hiring artists to recreate the sounds of human suffering, he told IndieWire which collected field recordings of places where one could hear such noises organically, such as the 2022 Paris riots.

“No matter how good an actor is, faking the pain of a serious injury, of a fatality, is a very difficult thing,” Burn told the portal. “And the film itself has such a documentary, natural, realistic vibe that anything remotely featureless isn’t going to work.”

Burn also said in an interview with the Slate “Working” podcast that he recorded audio of voices from several European cities to accurately portray all nationalities represented at Auschwitz.

To ensure the engine sounds were accurate to the time period, he sought help from a man in Estonia who had a collection of World War II-era German motorcycles.

Another challenge Burn and his team faced was figuring out how discernible the sounds of Auschwitz would be in real life. At the request of the film's production designer, he finally increased the auditory intensity. The resulting soundscape is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film.

And although the film received some criticism for its oblique treatment of the Holocaust, Burn's sonic achievement earned him industry praise – “Zone of Interest” won the BAFTA Award for Best Sound, as well as the top prize at the London Critics' Awards. circle. It also received five Oscar nominations, including Best Sound and Best Picture.

“It was a huge amount of people and things coming and going every day, and I think [Glazer] and I knew that and we had done our research, but somehow, I don't know, maybe [parecesse] disrespectful, but we were applying the sound very carefully and then we went away and put in a lot more,” Burn told IndieWire.

Although “Zone of Interest” is, on the surface, a film about the Holocaust, Glazer and producer James Wilson said its message remains as urgent as ever.

“It seems clear at this point that we should be concerned about the deaths of innocent people in Gaza or Yemen,” Wilson said at the BAFTAs. “In the same way, we think about the innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel.”

“This wall is to me a manifestation of how we compartmentalize the suffering of others – and normalize the suffering of others, to some extent – ​​in order to protect and preserve our own comfort and safety,” Glazer told CNN.

Basically, says Glazer, “The Zone of Interest” is about what we choose to pay attention to — and what we are able to ignore. “It’s not saying, ‘Look what they did,’” he said. “It’s saying, ‘Look what we do.’”

See also: the titles competing for Best Film at the 2024 Oscars