Ep. 21- The Zone of Interest with Barry Langford

                  Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is a haunting film focused on the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.  The family lived in a villa directly next to the Auschwitz I camp.  

                  In this podcast, I talk with film scholar and screenwriter Barry Langford about the history of Holocaust film as well as The Zone of Interest.  We cover a lot of ground from technical choices to the nature of the so-called “banality of evil.”

                  The Zone of Interest is available for free on Amazon Prime UK and for purchase on Amazon US.

Barry Langford is a professor of film studies at Royal Holloway University.  He is also an award-winning professional screenwriter.

Langford, Barry and R. Eaglestone (eds). Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2007)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.25)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're going to do a first on the Holocaust History Podcast, and that is to talk about a film. And the film that we're talking about today is The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, the director, which it's really an amazing film. And I'm very fortunate to have Barry Langford, who is a

professor of film history, particularly focusing on the Holocaust on the show to sort of talk us through it and sort of bounce ideas about what's going on in this movie. If you haven't seen it, at least if you're in the UK for sure, it's available on Amazon Prime. Definitely, you know, go and listen and watch it and then come back to the podcast. I mean, this does sort of have spoilers, I suppose, but you probably will mean more to you if you watch it. But anyway, Barry, welcome.

Barry (00:56.338)
Thank you very much, wait, loved you to be here.

Waitman (00:58.49)
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are and how you got interested in the topic of Holocaust film?

Barry (01:06.098)
Sure, I actually, weirdly enough, inherited the topic about 25 years ago now when I joined Royal Holloway, really in my first year there, I had a former colleague, Stella Bruzzi, a very renowned film academic, who was at the time teaching a course on documentary film and television, which she handed over to me, first year course to teach, and she had taught as a sort of self -contained module within that module.

a four week concentrated block on films about the Holocaust. It was, it was, the course was only, it was only a 10 week course, but she taught this concentrated little block in which she covered both dramatic and documentary treatments of the Holocaust, Nightmare and Fog, Shower, Schindler's List, and I think the TV mini -series Holocaust. And this was a subject that I'd never really actually considered prior to that point, although I had had a colleague.

or a peer of mine when I was getting my PhD at Columbia in New York who was writing her dissertation on Holocaust literature. But at that time, which is the mid 1990s, I think it really wasn't quite as evolved a dimension of either sort of broadly speaking cultural studies or of Holocaust studies as it's obviously very much become over the intervening two and a half decades. So that's how I got into it. And...

Essentially, I inherited the module, became fascinated by it, started doing a considerable amount of research around the issues raised by, in particular, the audiovisual representation of the Holocaust, was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute to a, I think, very significant conference on Holocaust literature and film, which was held in London at UCL in, I think, 1998, which was addressed by Lawrence Langer and Beryl Lang, amongst others.

And really it sort of kicked on, it kicked on from there. And like many people who have interested themselves in this area, I probably started out with a sort of unexamined opposition, if you like, between not only documentary and drama, but also the popular or mass cultural take or take on or appropriation of the Holocaust versus the...

Barry (03:30.61)
the more austere, esoteric, challenging, and in the sort of Adornian sense, if you like, somehow maybe more ethically appropriate or felt to be versions of the Holocaust. That's, if you like, the kind of Shoah versus Shinders list dichotomy, which is very present within Holocaust studies in the 90s. And I...

Waitman (03:50.298)
Right.

Barry (04:00.434)
really started from the premise quite quickly that I was interested in breaking down or at least interrogating that kind of binary, looking at the ways in which, let's call them popular or mass culture versions of the Holocaust, might be interesting beyond the very obvious argument that, well, these reach more people than, let's say, Night and Fog or Sho, which is obviously true, but not very, you can't, you know, it's rather banal point to make. I became...

more interested in the ways in, for example, in the ways in which overtly mainstream or generic takes of the Holocaust or films like Shredda's List, which are not straightforwardly generic, but nonetheless are bound up, imbricated, if you like, in complex ways with the history of Hollywood cinema more generally, are seeking not only to meet audiences, if you like, where they are, which is a version of the...

extended audience argument, but also are actually making potentially arguments about the Holocaust being part of our world. If we represent the Holocaust in the same, not using a new language or seeking to find representational strategies or modes which are altogether other than what you encounter at the multiplex on a Saturday evening conventionally, then you are also saying, or at least might be saying, that the Holocaust too.

unfolded as obviously we know it did in our world, not in an alternate reality. So that's the kind of questions I got an interesting asking.

Waitman (05:34.65)
is

Yeah, I mean, that's a question automatically for me, which is, is the structure of these films already something that's challenging in the sense of, because you talked about sort of, you know, films, Holocaust films being presented in sort of the same way as our normal cinematic experience. But then you also have things like Son of Saul, which it seems to me is shot in a very particularly and intentionally

different way than what we expect from most films, which will also tie in, I think, to Zone of Interest, which is also shot in a way that is not, and shot may be the wrong word, I'm not a film person, but is set up, is structurally created in a way that's different from sort of our standard, what we might expect when we go to a theater. Does that make sense? Does that?

Barry (06:29.17)
It absolutely makes sense and it goes right to the heart of what I'm sort of talking about here. And I mean, there's no question, and I think perhaps it's most acutely present, though not uniquely so, when we're talking about films that are dealing with what you might call the sharp end or the final stage of the extermination process itself, particularly whether it's at Auschwitz or whether it's in the Operation Reinhardt camps, which actually have barely been.

depicted on screen. Auschwitz is already, Auschwitz -Birkenau, I should say, is much more prominent as it reflects its cultural centrality over the last half century. So I think that films that seek to make sense of those experiences are liable, though by no means guaranteed, to be looking for representational strategies which...

On the one hand, might be thought to acknowledge the otherness or the alterity, if you want, of the experience. And I think both Son of Saul and The Zone of Interest could fall into that category. They are stylistically very striking films, obviously in completely different ways. But they both are, they're not just stylistically striking, they're technically very interesting. Son of Saul used the...

the so -called Academy ratio, a sort of square screen format which has fallen out of fashion since really the 1950s in most mainstream cinema in favor of more oblong, widescreen formats. And of course, a very sharply delimited visual field whereby only the foreground effectively saws face is consistently held in focus and around him there's this blur of different activities which we glimpse without seeing fully.

zone of interest, we'll get onto it in more detail perhaps, that has an even more distinctive technical approach, which then in turn begets a particular visual style on screen. So those approaches, on the one hand, as I say, they might be seen to be in some way respecting the alterity of the experience, they equally might be seen to be simply responses to certain practical problems. They're also moral and ethical problems, but they are practical problems of exactly how do you render the...

Barry (08:53.81)
unimaginable and also just simply at a practical level very, very hard to recreate whatever you think of the ethics of trying to do so. It's very, very hard, if not impossible to create anything that actually resembles the daily experience of Auschwitz, especially Auschwitz -Birkenau from what we have, you know, in survivor accounts and the like. There are, of course, films which attempt to do just that. I mean, The Grey Zone, for example.

film which is held in very high regard by some and I think it's an okay film, is at the, broadly speaking, stylistically entirely conventional. It's unremarkable at that level. We can consume it. It's difficult because of the subject matter. It's not difficult because it asks us to look and therefore think in different ways.

Waitman (09:38.49)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (09:43.226)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting piece of this as well, which is this idea of the knowability or unknowability. Because I think both the films that we've been talking about so far, Son of Saul and Zone of Interest, they don't walk you through everything that's happening and sort of explain what's happening in the way that, you know, a conventional film, and maybe this is sort of a poor mode of filmmaking, but, you know, oftentimes,

films will have a character that sort of says more than they probably would in real life so that you understand what's going on. You know, they give you some cues, whereas I think Son of Saul as well, you know, you're left to kind of guess about a lot of the things that are going on. And I think potentially also with Zone of Interest, as we talked about a little bit before we started recording, you know, unless you're a sort of scholar of this period, there are things that are not straightforwardly explained.

for the viewer. I mean, is that also part of it? Where sort of form meets function, you know, that we are, it's intended not to be confusing per se, but not to be laid out for you in a sort of beginning, middle and end kind of way.

Barry (10:52.434)
Yeah, Son of Saul, I mean, perhaps as we go on, we'll just for people's benefit of anybody who hasn't seen this film, it's ultimately this Hungarian film, 2015, directed by László Nemes, one of the Academy Award for best foreign language film. Son of Saul is particularly, if you like, non didactic, if by didactic we mean that it doesn't, there's no exposition dumping whatsoever in the film. But then the film's version of Birkenau, I suppose, is that it is an experience of lethal chaos.

And that, in a way, is the point that it's making. So for somebody to... Apart from the fact that it's really inconceivable, you can't imagine what such a scene would look like or what such a character would be. So apart from the fact that there is nobody there who is going to give us a walkthrough of the crematoria and saying, okay, now this is what we do here and so on, the actual purpose of the film is to immerse us in what it understands as having been an experience of constant...

violent, angry chaos from dawn to dusk, day after day, which incidentally is a very, very different, and I think, although of course I'm not a historian, but I try to keep abreast of historical scholarship, obviously, I think that as far as historians are concerned, that version of Birkenau, the bloody chaos version, if you like, the bloody violent chaos version.

is would generally be regarded now to be much more accurate historically than the, if you like, the received image of the sort of sterile, streamlined factory of death. And so if you do go back, and we're talking now going back over 20 years to 2001, I think off the top of my head, when Tim Blake Nelson made The Grey Zone, a film that I've referred to previously.

That film is explicitly conceived and you can actually read about it in Blake Nelson's director's notes, which were published alongside the screenplay of the film. That film was explicitly conceived with the understanding that the so -called industrialized Holocaust at Birkenau was efficient. It was machine -like, it was methodical, all of this. And in that sense, both the visual style of the film, which as I've said before, is fairly...

Barry (13:17.298)
conventional, but also what it depicts of the killing process and the lives of those involved in it. It's a film that, like Son of Saul, focuses on the experience of the Zonda Commando, the men who were kept alive for a certain period to assist with the killing process, the running of the crematoria and so forth. Its version of the Holocaust therefore reflects a particular historical account.

One I think which is no longer current or to nothing like the same the same degree

Waitman (13:50.618)
Well, it's many ways the and I've mentioned this on other episodes here too, that that's sort of taking the perpetrators self -serving perspective sort of for granted, right? This was a, you know, because I feel like the subtext is always the subtext underneath this sort of industrialized factory style killing is that it was somehow humane, which is kind of the Nazi, the Nazi version of it, right? That, well, you know,

Ultimately, this was bad and we had to do this, but it was a relatively humane process, which I think, you know, is clearly not.

Barry (14:22.578)
albeit, I think even in Nazi discourse, the emphasis seems to be rather more on that it's humane for the perpetrators rather than any concern for the obviously for the victims. But built into that, yes, is some sense that this was an unpleasant task undertaken, like the defenders of industrialized meat food production today would say the same kind of thing. It's an unpleasant.

Waitman (14:30.042)
Yes. Yes. But even even that description.

Barry (14:51.41)
process, but one undertaken with the minimum of unnecessary, you know, brutality or bloodiness, which we know, which is obviously a self -serving lie. And we know that it's absolutely not the case. And to the extent that a film renders it as such, then a film could certainly be argued to be doing a disservice to the actual experience. So in the grey zone, again, and I'm not beating up on the film, but there is a scene in which

Waitman (15:03.962)
Yes.

Barry (15:21.106)
to the accompaniment of a string orchestra playing literally at the entrance to the crematoria, which of course we know is not historically accurate, an entirely orderly and undistressed crowd of people are fairly languidly, if not benignly, ushered down into the subterranean spaces of the undressing room on a sort of sunlit day in Auschwitz.

And we know enough now, if we didn't already in 2002, to know that bears very little resemblance to the actual experience on which these massacres were conducted.

Waitman (16:02.618)
And then of course, the contradiction often is that there's, there's, it seems to be to me as an outsider, that there's a taboo in terms of actually showing cinematic depictions of inside a gas chamber with, with the interesting exception of Schindler's List, which gets around it by basically making us think that we're seeing a gas chamber right up until the moment that it becomes a shower. Right. And so, and that's something we'll talk about, I think in this film as well, because this film takes a different perspective on how do we depict.

the act of killing, the moment of killing, which is something that, as I understand it, has been sort of a constant taboo from the beginning of the time that we started looking at these films, in the sense of showing people dying in a gas chamber. I mean, the people...

Barry (16:48.274)
It's not quite a constant taboo. There are a small number of films which do, in fact, depict it. But yes, it's certainly felt to be a taboo. It's still felt to be a taboo in the sense that if it's rendered, and it very, very rarely is, when I say a small number, I'm taking less than a single handful of films that I know of, have sought to depict the final stages of mass murder in the gas chamber.

So it's a taboo that as and when it is broken, it's very powerfully felt to be a taboo that is being broken. And I also think that the sort of oracular impact of Claude Landsman's pronouncements on this have also held a lot of sway in terms of structuring thought around the issue. And Landsman famously said in a...

a celebrated seminar that he conducted at Yale in 1991, that if he had ever found, if he said, but if by some miracle or obscenity, a film of thousands of people dying in the gas chamber still existed, or had existed and had been preserved, I would have destroyed it rather than shown it. He says, you cannot look at this. He says, he repeats it, you cannot look at this. So that very strong sense from one of the...

throughout his life, or certainly from the making of the release of Show Up onwards, the most tireless proponents of what you might call a kind of maximalist account of the hard line between what can or should be seen or attempted to be rendered and what ultimately can't be, Landsman. That's been also an important player.

in this. And the fact, I suppose, the last thing I'll say is that the fact that most of the, let's call them most highly regarded treatment of the Holocaust in visual media, by which I'm thinking not merely of Sherwood, but also things like, for example, Spiegelman's Mouse, have overtly undertaken representational strategies that depart from direct

Barry (19:11.09)
conventional, let alone mimetic strategies for rendering the experience, particularly the... And we are, I think, specifically most talking about the experience, as I say, of mass murder in the camps. The Holocaust by Bullets, which isn't very well represented on screen anyway, doesn't suffer from exactly the same kinds of prohibitions, I don't think. And obviously there are many, many dramas, Holocaust -centred dramas.

around survival, around escape, around flight, refuge, et cetera. And those also are more amenable, let's say, to conventional representational strategies than the difficulty of the death camps.

Waitman (19:55.162)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, definitely. And, you know, I think also there's the issue of.

If you do depict it, I mean, there's sort of the paradox. If you do predict it, if you do depict it, if you get it 100 % accurate, is that ethical to show in the first place? And if you don't get it 100 % accurate, then are you doing a disservice to the actual truth of the event anyway? Which I think is maybe more of a philosophical conversation. But maybe we should turn a little bit to this film, right? And can you tell us a little bit about sort of...

where this comes from, what Jonathan Glazer's trying to do with it, because it is a book, I believe, which admittedly I have not read, but I have seen the film.

Barry (20:38.074)
Yeah, it's a novel by Martin Amis, but Glaser has really taken only the title and the setting from the novel, because the novel, which I think is actually one of Amis's worst, is much more broadly focused on Auschwitz and Auschwitz -Birkenau than the film is. And there is a, and it's told in three strands, actually, one of which is...

a narrative concerning the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, but he's not called Hurs. I mean, he is clearly Hurs, but he's not called Hurs, he's called Dol in the novel. And the other two strands of the narrative involve a businessman or industrialist who is involved with the Auschwitz Monowitz, I think, or one of the other outlying camps. And the third strand involves a member of the Sonderkommando. And

So out of all of that, you know, Glaser has really literally only taken the one strand and rather than adapting the strand as Amos narrates it, he has simply really taken the setting of that strand, the title of the novel, and he's gone off and researched. And he's, you know, he's been very vocal about the amount of historical research that's went into.

the making of the film. Now we obviously can take that with as much of a grain of salt as we want. But it's clear that he didn't rely on Amos's narrative for what he's delivered in the film.

Waitman (22:13.338)
Right.

And am I correct that, because I went to a screening of this with Sue Weiss, right? And Dominic Williams, my colleague here at Northumbria. And I think they mentioned that the tone of the novel was almost completely different too, that it was kind of a sort of dark humor. I mean, it wasn't sort of the stark depiction that we get from the film also. I mean, is that true?

Barry (22:41.01)
No, not at all. I mean, it doesn't have the mordant wit, I don't think, of Amos's best novels, within which, incidentally, I would include Time's Arrow, which is his other Holocaust novel, which I think is a novel of extraordinary daring and imagination. I think he would have probably done well to have left his treatment of the subject matter at that and not returned to it at a later point in his career. But yeah, tonally, the novel is kind of all over the place. There's a sort of romantic narrative.

There's the attempt to do a first -person narrative from the perspective of the Zonderkommando member, which I think is extremely unsuccessful. There's a kind of intrigue plot. And yes, there are elements of satire and low comedy as well. So yes, it's completely different. It doesn't have anything of the austere, almost sort of, you know, monocular focus of the film. If the film was called something else...

Waitman (23:38.97)
You wouldn't attribute it to...

Barry (23:39.602)
Yeah, I should also point out, I suppose that the reason the novel is called the zone of interest is that Amos is actually interested in the historically speaking the zone of interest, the SS's larger, you know, garrison and, you know, arrangement, if you like, of the Polish Tamil of Oswiecim and, you know, how that actually functioned at the sort of social and economic level, whereas

Glaser's film is not really about the zone of interest at all. It's about the Hearst household. You don't need to look at the concept of a zone of interest in the historical sense to justify that title. Now it has its own, I suppose, well not I suppose, it clearly has its own reference in terms of the action of the film. But it's not about the actual historical zone of interest in the way that Amos' novel is.

Waitman (24:31.162)
No, it's an exceptional play on words that I think works amazingly well because the zone of interest in the film sort of, I think, asks the question, what are we interested in? And the idea of space, I think, is also a theme that runs throughout the film in terms of the spaces that are interesting, right? And the spaces that we are interested in, the spaces that the characters in the film are interested in.

Barry (24:45.106)
Sure.

Barry (25:00.434)
And also the spaces that they choose to be interested in, which of course, I mean, the most obvious, I guess you could call it an irony of the film, is that the principal zone in which the Hirst family will, well, in fact, the only zone in which we encounter them and the principal zone in which they are interested, certainly Mrs. Hirst, is the garden. That's their zone of interest. Now, our zone of interest is not that.

Waitman (25:03.258)
Yes.

Barry (25:28.21)
or at least our interest is bifurcated between on the one hand our kind of appalled fascination with the Huss family undertaking their parody of House Beautiful on literally on the perimeter of mass murder. So our interest is bifurcated between that and what is going on the other side of the wall, which is signaled to us by the orally.

by the film's extremely inventive soundtrack of what's going on the other side of what they choose not to see, what we cannot see and arguably maybe don't want to see but nonetheless are fascinated by and which the person by contrast seem to be able to exist in complete indifference to.

Waitman (26:16.762)
Yeah, I mean, that's a great segue into sort of one of the things that I thought we should mention, which is the sound work. Because the film starts with this sort of horrid kind of screeching sound, which also I think comes back at the end too. There's sort of a, but there's an, I've watched it obviously several times, but the first time I saw it was in a theater here in Newcastle. So I got the full experience and it's, there's an uncomfortably long.

time of just blackness on the screen and sound, you know, that, so it's clearly, it's much longer than you would expect most conventional films that have like a, an introductory sort of sounds and then you see what's going on. And then of course the sound doesn't seem to have anything to do directly, at least, or at least sort of literally with what's going on on the screen. But can you, I mean, can you talk about the sort of the use of film or sound rather, cause I think it's really powerful and perhaps different.

Barry (27:13.906)
Yes, well, you've described, I think, very well the opening moments of the film. And to say moments is actually, as you say, it's several minutes when we're looking effectively at a black screen accompanied by this, you know, Michael Levi's remarkable atonal electronic distorted soundscape, which we would probably quite happily...

endure for a few seconds if it was then the lead in to let's say a conventional action movie or a superhero movie and we suddenly found ourselves on the surface of an unknown planet that would all make sense but as it is we're subjected to it that's the only way to really describe it we are in our seats if watching it in the theater we're subjected to this really quite hellish soundscape for much longer than we are comfortable with or prepared for and that's clearly a signal

to the spectator about, if you like, the degree of comfort which they should expect in consuming this film. And in some ways it's probably maybe comparable to some of the things that, for example, Landsman does in Shoah. In that case, it's just the film's maybe entire sort of nine hour duration. But even within that, there are quite lengthy stretches where the camera appears to be doing nothing but gazing at Polish fields and woodlands and train tracks and inviting us to...

reflect and draw conclusions. I mean, this is much more of an assault on the spectator than that. But nonetheless, insofar as it departs from our conventional assumptions about what a movie or going to the movies looks like, it's doing something similar. And I should say, I think it does signal to the viewer that we shouldn't expect this to be a comfortable viewing experience. Now, one could criticize that and say that there's a kind of finger wagging.

dimension to that. And certainly some people feel that there are moments in this film. I mean, I don't know, wait, whether you think it's we just we just assume that everybody listening to this will have seen the film. And then we can talk about it without having to, you know, recount it's sort of plot such as it is in visual style and so forth. We assume that people will know what we're talking about. Yeah. Okay.

Waitman (29:28.858)
Yeah, generally speaking. Yeah, I mean, it's about the host family at Auschwitz, but I think...

Barry (29:33.874)
Sure. Anyway, I would, let's probably assume that people who've chosen to listen to an hour -long podcast on it will probably see it first. This is not Mayo and Kermode after all. So some people do feel that there are moments in the film where Glazer seems to feel the need to signal to the audience the extremity of the material. And that would certainly be true of the opening.

Waitman (29:40.186)
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And if you haven't, go listen to it, go watch it, and come back. Right.

Barry (30:02.706)
soundscape that we're talking about, it would arguably be true of the very end where Hess wretches unexpectedly and then disappears into the darkness and then that soundscape returns. And there's also a moment in the middle of the film where unexpectedly a close up of a flower, I think it's a red dahlia, leeches into a crimson wash that covers the entire

Waitman (30:10.97)
Yeah.

Barry (30:32.562)
screen. So it's a departure, if you like, from the kind of quasi observational tenor of most of the rest of the film. And so some people certainly have felt that those are slight, maybe, breaches of what Glaser otherwise elsewhere in the film seems to be attempting to do, which is simply to render the horror of this experience.

in precisely its ordinariness, in its quotidian qualities. So whether we actually need the horrific soundscape of the opening or whether the film should simply cut to an unremarkable scene of a family in their garden and then allow us to draw our own conclusions, that's, I think, a point that it's fair to make. It is, however, true that...

Because we're uncomfortable at the beginning, we are primed for a movie that is going to be uncomfortable watching in other ways. And although it's not uncomfortable in the ways that are more extremely, it's not uncomfortable in the ways that the son of Saul is uncomfortable. It's not viscerally uncomfortable, violence is entirely off screen, et cetera. It's uncomfortable, not least in the fact that it is objectively, if you like, quite boring, a lot of it. I mean, if it wasn't, if these people weren't,

who we know them to be, the banality of their lives and what we experience of them would just be a very, very dreary two hours. The dreariness is rendered compelling to us because of what we know about, because what we do know of who they are. But I do think that soundscape signals that at the outset.

Waitman (32:15.642)
Yeah, and the soundscape also is almost like an additional character in the film that sort of remains, it obviously remains auditory. But it's, you know, they're in the garden, they're doing whatever they're doing, and you hear shouting and gunshots and things like this. You're sort of in the background. And in that way, it seems like it's, or even sometimes what I suppose is meant to sound like the roar of the furnaces of the bodies being burned. So it's almost like the...

The soundtrack is just this constant reminder that there's this other thing going on outside the sort of visual space, but it's there. It's there the whole time.

Barry (32:53.714)
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, the off -screen space in the film is, as you say, it's effectively a, I don't know if you'd call it a character exactly, but it's a space that we never see directly, but which entirely structures our understanding and experience of the space that we do see. So the constant soundscape of...

Waitman (33:19.45)
Yes.

Barry (33:22.354)
coming from the other side of the boundary wall of the garden, which is actually part of the perimeter wall of the Outfits One camp itself, which is a soundtrack of the shots, cries, mostly men shouting, people crying out and screaming in fear, dogs barking, trains arriving, all this stuff, which is constant throughout the entire film, and to which the...

Husk family, their guests and their servants simply do not, they don't know, they don't respond to it in any way whatsoever. They don't notice it. It doesn't impact upon them. That's a sort of constant presence in the film. I was actually lucky enough just the other week to hear an excellent paper by Libby Saxton from Queen Mary University of London, who's written extensively about the representation of

liminal spaces like the gas chamber in the Holocaust. And she was talking about zone of interest. And she, a lot of part of the paper focused on a quotation from Hannah Arendt, who in writing about totalitarianism and what renders it possible, talks about the incapacity of people, quote, thinking where they are not. It's about the inability or the learned inability, perhaps we might say, to

think outside of a narrowly drawn and self -serving frame of interpretative and political and ethical reference. And of course, that's absolutely true for the Hess family in the film, but it's not true for us because we can only think, if you like, where we are not in our viewing of this film. Our focus is...

our emotional focus, our imaginative focus is almost entirely, well, it's very, very heavily on the other side of that garden, of that garden, water garden.

Waitman (35:25.53)
This is something that really struck me, and if you'll permit a very short anecdote, it reminded me of in the Holocaust Museum in DC, when you get to the portion that's about the Holocaust by bullets, they have a display of monitors that show particularly gruesome images and films, and they've built them so that they're kind of in a box, and it's a certain height, right?

Barry (35:48.594)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Waitman (35:53.434)
And I all, whenever I visit, I always see children of a certain age, you know, trying to climb up and see into it. And the reason that that came to my mind when I was watching the film is exactly as this, the person you mentioned, I think has put their finger on. When you're watching the film, it's almost like one part of you, yeah, is clocking what the Hess family is doing. But the other part in a sort of voyeuristic sense is straining to see.

what's going on exactly in those spaces that are unseen, right? You're looking for, you know, what can I see around the gate? You know, can I see, and even the film does this, because the closest that it ever gets to showing really any of the, physically showing any of the persecution is a shot looking at Hess's head from below, where he's clearly on the ramp or someplace in Bear Canal or next to the gas chambers.

But that's it. And so there is this weird, I wonder if the film is trying to make a point of like catching you with you, the viewer, having this voyeuristic desire to see what's going on in the worst part of the camp, whereas the Hess family is exactly not doing that.

Barry (37:07.826)
Yeah, I mean, I think the film does actually mobilise that desire in the spectator, but I think that if it does, that could argue to be something of a misstep on the part of the film. And if I just draw in a comparison here, which would take too long to unpack completely because it's a complex argument, but you referred earlier on to the fact that in Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg appears to be...

inviting us into the interior of a homicidal gas chamber when the Schindler women arrive at Auschwitz and they're herded, they're stripped and herded into a shower room and the door is closed on them and then we go back inside the room with them after the door has been closed. And because when we see the film for the first time, none of us, or at least none of us who aren't really, really quite serious experts in how new arrivals are processed at Auschwitz,

None of us have any sense that there were showers at Auschwitz other than fake showers, which were actually gas chambers. Therefore, we assume that we are now that we've gone now that we've gone back inside the shower room with the Schindler women after the door has been shot. We didn't stay outside on the other side of the peephole, so to speak. We sort of imagine that, OK, now we are we're for it. We are going to have to watch this. And again.

I don't think that Spielberg is in control of the implications of his own representation at this point, but it does mobilize on, if you like, this almost kind of pornographic impulse on the spectator's part just to see to, okay, you know, let's go for it. Let's see the whole thing. Now, if that's what's going on, and I think that, sure, I think it's quite, there is almost a sort of instinctive drive in the context of the cinematic medium. There's a, what you might kind of, well,

theorists would call a sort of scopic drive, or what Linda Williams, who is a theorist of pornography, once famously called the frenzy of the visible, you know, you just want to see it all. If that's going on in a zone of interest, I think it's kind of slightly beside the point, because the point of the film surely is not that there are terrible things here, don't you want to see them? But it really wants us to be focusing on the fact that

Waitman (39:09.338)
Right.

Barry (39:28.494)
Mrs. Huss and the rest of their family are able not to see these things in any sense, that they will literally to see them and also, of course, morally, ethically, et cetera, they're able not to see them. And then to ask a set of questions about how this is possible, are they actively refusing to acknowledge...

what they are not even merely complicit in what they are, you know, key actors in, are they unable to take on board what they are involved in because of the sheer enormity of it? Is it what we might call a sort of learned inability? They've taught themselves simply not to not to notice this stuff. I mean, and if in that case, there is a sociologist, Harold Veltzer, who speaks about

frames of reference and how the the kind of progressive dehumanization and social modernization of Jews in Germany and pre -war Germany and Austria effectively kind of rendered them out of sight and therefore what was being done to them as kind of less and less of a meaningful issue for non -Jewish Germans because you know step by step by step you just get used to this stuff and yes that's sort of that's sort of what happens with their Jews what can you expect you know that could be an element of what's going on.

what's going on here. I do think that it's possible to argue, and I don't know whether I agree with this or not, but it's certainly possible to argue that Glazer's approach to this subject is kind of tendentious in the sense that as somebody who's lived for many, many years beneath the Heathrow flight path, I know that you never fully...

you never fully tune it out. You tend to notice it more when friends come around for lunch, because from other parts of London, they say, wow, we're on the fight path. They say, yeah, we are. But even you yourself, you're out there one summer's afternoon on your own, and a particularly loud playing goes overhead. You don't simply ignore it. You're aware of it and slightly annoyed by it. So whether the Hearst families

Barry (41:53.746)
Whether the Hess family are not rendered psychopathological, I guess, is the question, by their ability completely to ignore. They don't respond to, if there's a louder shot than usual, if there's an outburst of screaming more than the average, they don't over their cucumber sandwiches say, goodness, noisy over there today, isn't it? How annoying. They literally just don't seem to register it at all.

Waitman (42:19.914)
Is this the is this the role that the mother plays in the film? Because the mother shows up to visit. I think it's it's has his wife's mother. And, you know, for listeners, hopefully, again, you should see the film. But basically, she is is introduced as someone who does who has not become acculturated to this environment. And at first, she thinks it's really wonderful and sort of that the Hess family is living above their means, et cetera. But then she gets a.

Barry (42:25.586)
Mm -hmm.

Barry (42:30.546)
Yeah.

Waitman (42:48.378)
I'm assuming both sort of visual and sensory introduction to the mass murder piece. And she leaves. And the implication in the film seems to be that she kind of wrote a note saying something to the effect of at a minimum, she found it gross. Whether or not she was morally opposed, I think is up to the viewer, but she leaves. And so is the function of that character to kind of reinforce your point there that, you know, this is normal to one set of people.

people but if an outsider who is not sort of accustomed to this comes in then they can immediately notice that this is an ab -

Barry (43:26.226)
sure that's right. Yes, I wouldn't call the mother -in -law any kind of identification figure, but she is clearly, I mean, to use our earlier term, there's an element of didacticism in there for us.

Waitman (43:38.682)
Right.

Barry (43:44.082)
I think, however, the point still remains that if the film is presenting itself as a study of, well, I don't really like the phrase the banality of evil, I'm sure you don't particularly either, but if it's in that general field, then one wonders whether showing the Hirst family's accommodation with the unimaginable horror beyond their walls in a slightly more...

nuanced register than absolute wall to wall obliviousness, you know, might not have actually been more challenging. In other words, seeing a group of people who they didn't talk about it all the time, they don't have any particular moral issues, but you know, from time to time, they will acknowledge that things are a bit hectic or a bit noisy or you know, I wish they'd shut up over there or something like that.

Waitman (44:37.338)
There are some moments, I mean there's the one moment where Hus is in the stream in the solar river, you know, and he encounters skeletal remains and the assumption is that they come from the camp and this causes him to sort of have this really sort of emotional freak out and he has to wash the soot and the ashes off his children. But that also, you know, now that you mention it, I guess I suppose could be seen as a bit heavy -handed in terms of -

Barry (44:44.786)
Yes.

Barry (45:04.754)
Well, obviously, in the first place, that's a moment of extreme rupture. And I know this partly because, again, without digressing too far, some years ago I wrote a short Holocaust -themed film myself called Torto Bloomer, which dealt with a fictionalized account of an episode in the life of Fran Stangel, the commandant of Treblinka. And in the original version of that script, I had a moment of, if you like, stark rupture, where Stangel...

who was conceived by me as a character who spent his entire life, again, rather like the zone of interest, not choosing not to see, choosing to, as it were, construct a reality for himself which was different than what he was actually engaged in day by day. There was a moment of rupture where he was brought face to face with what was actually happening in a very unpleasant for him way. And we eliminated that actually ultimately from the final version of the film that was released.

partly because we felt that that made the character too pathological. That the only way that a character could go from this moment of absolute, abominable, appalling clarity confronted with the reality of his crimes back to, as it were, the next moment, what are we having for tea, was to turn him into a kind of psychopath. And that was not interesting. And the problem, you know, I suppose there would be with Hirst in the Stream, it's a dramatic moment. It's a moment of rupture, which obviously is different from the quotidian day by day,

or the soundscape on the other side of the wall. But I think it is, yes, it does seem a touch heavy -handed. On a particular day, they choose to go out on a fishing trip on a particular bit of the river, then suddenly, there are bones and ash. Who would have thought it? It seems a slightly contrived way. But apart from the contrivance, it then raises the question, well, what are we supposed to make of this?

The character goes home, he washes himself up, and then he gets on with stuff.

Waitman (47:09.306)
Yeah, I mean, I think also we talked a little about this. As a Holocaust historian, you know, I pick up I pick up lots of what we might call in other movies or video games, Easter eggs, you know, like cues that or illusions, references that actually make it much more nuanced, right? A couple of them, for example, at the very beginning of the film, what you see is some prisoners show up with a sack full of things. And these things.

As a Holocaust story, I immediately pick up those things are from transports. Those are the belongings of murdered Jews. Mrs. Hus gets out for a coach. He goes upstairs. She checks the lining to see if any valuables are sewn into it. She talks about the fact that a friend of hers found diamonds and toothpaste, right, which were which are all very much cues that she knows exactly what's going on and where things are coming from. And there are multiple examples of these. You know, there's the.

the top and sons engineers that show up who are presenting the designs for a new and improved crematoria, et cetera. And of course I pick up all these things and I think it makes the film actually nuanced. But the challenge then would be for someone that isn't immersed as a scholar in this stuff, those things are much more difficult to pick up. They're not sort of self -evident necessarily where these things are coming from. And so maybe that's one of the reasons for...

you know, there's sort of very soft touch and then a bop over the head for people that, you know, may not be getting it completely. I don't know.

Barry (48:43.986)
Yeah, I mean, I don't think the film could... I'm not sure the film can be accused of being too elliptical, actually. I mean, I think there are enough moments in the film that even if you're not deep in the weeds, as you might say, or in scholarly terms, any kind of expert on Holocaust history, provided that you, I suppose...

have a rough knowledge of what Auschwitz was and what the Holocaust was. And I think the film does, that seems reasonable, right? The film does presuppose that its audience are not going to come into this completely innocent of any knowledge of those things. And I think that seems a fair assumption to make. I think provided that any audience with that, there are enough moments in the film, which actually could be accused of being quite in some respects, heavy -handed, such as the moment in the river, such as seeing the children playing, you know,

games with human teeth. These you might say are, particularly the latter, are actually devices that might seem more at home in the Texas chainsaw massacre than in a story about a bourgeois German household which happens to be located, doesn't just happen, but happens to be, scare quotes, located on the perimeter of Auschwitz. I mean, I think that it's very interesting because the film,

Waitman (49:42.138)
Yes.

Barry (50:09.65)
The first viewing, and I think as one might say tonally, the film comes across or it reads, if you like, as extremely controlled, hyper controlled. It reads as a film in which every element has been carefully weighed and measured and placed. And the very distinctive technical approach to filmmaking, which we haven't talked about yet, is kind of part of that.

But then on a further interrogation, there are actually, I think, you know, the film reveals itself to have uncertainties. And those moments that we've just been talking about could be seen as maybe uneasy tells, where Glazer feels, if you like, is worried almost, that either he's making a film which isn't dramatically interesting enough, or a film which isn't, which won't be, you know,

Waitman (51:03.098)
Mm -hmm.

Barry (51:09.266)
clear enough or won't be read as morally, as clearly as he wants it to be. And there's a lot of disagreement about how we're supposed to interpret Huss's final moment of bodily projection. Why does he vomit? What's actually going on there for him and what are we supposed to make of it?

Waitman (51:27.578)
Yes.

Waitman (51:33.754)
Well, let's jump ahead to that real quick. I want to come back to the technical piece and I want to come back to because I think this is one of the areas that I was questioning, which is the girl who is leaving food for the prisoners. But let's jump ahead to this is a question that I sort of noted down the second time that I watched it. You know, what do you make of the throwing up scene when he so basically for the audience really quickly, he finds he's kind of transferred from his job at Auschwitz to another place.

But then in preparation for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews, he sort of knows, he finds out he's going to be sort of transferred back. And he's in the stairwell of the headquarters in Berlin. He throws up from some kind of reason. So Barry, what do you think? How do you explain that?

Barry (52:24.466)
I don't know that I have a very, I don't know that I have an explanation that really satisfies me, to be honest. It seems to be a version, as far as I can tell, it seems to be a version of, you know, the idea that the body keeps the score, that at some almost, you know, molecular or level, there's a dimension of herse which revolts against

Waitman (52:40.634)
Mm -hmm.

Barry (52:53.81)
what he is, what he's doing, what he's become, I suppose. And that while there's no connection from that to, there's no self, there's no, it's not a moment very, I think it's clearly performed and conceived. It's not a moment of self -revelation or self -awareness. And one imagines that if we were to see,

sort of subsequent scenes after this with Hersey would probably be telling his wife that he had a terrible moment of indigestion when he was going down the stairs and he must not, you know, he must be careful to lay off the champagne and, and sauerkraut at future SS receptions or something like that. You know, I don't think there's any sense that he's being brought face to face with the full horror of his actions, but maybe that is at some somatic level, there's a part of him that can't any longer cope with it. I'm not really sure.

How else to read it? Because we're not given, I should say also, obviously everybody who's seen the film, but in case you don't remember it, we're not up close to us. This doesn't happen in close up. It's not like those Hollywood scenes where somebody cries and wretches and we're sort of right there with them and we can see that it's a moment of soul wrenching agony or drunkenness or whatever. It's all happening in medium long shot.

Waitman (53:51.642)
So.

Waitman (54:01.146)
Yeah.

Waitman (54:13.402)
Right. So, so to join here, my, my crazy interpretation. So I mean, first of all, I thought immediately of the act of killing, which is a different film. but a film that also features a perpetrator who gets sick, right. but my, my take, I turned it on its head a little bit, which was to think about thinking about Hus as, as vomiting from the stress of the pressure of knowing that he's being put back on the stage to be successful. Right. And so like in my mind, the way that I took it was,

Barry (54:16.593)
Yeah.

Waitman (54:43.066)
he's really nervous because he sort of has been fired and he's given a second chance to excel, you know, and has a lot of pressure put on him. And so that it's not even a psychosomatic sort of response of opposition, but more just he really wants to do a good job and is stressed out about it, which may be wrong, but it puts a different spin on her.

Barry (55:06.61)
Yeah, I like that. I -

Sure, it seems in character, actually, and I like it. I would suppose I would ask then why does Glazer choose to end his depiction of Huss in that way? I mean, maybe again it's a challenge to us as an audience, in a way, to say that our conventional register of interpretations of, let's say, the act of vomiting as something that is, you know...

literally it bespeaks, you know, disgust and whatever and stress and so forth, that our conventional register of is not appropriate here. And that if we're looking and I think, yeah, I can actually, I think I'm I would go probably go along with that now that you've you've raised that, that actually we are in a way, the film is a sort of two hour gambit, you might say, in

challenging our assumptions about the interiority of movie characters. We assume that they have an interiority and that at some point we can access it and that by accessing it, we will encounter the, even if it's concealed and partial humanity of characters, maybe morally noxious or ambivalent characters. Obviously, Huss is noxious, not just ambivalent. And maybe therefore this ending is a way of, you know,

Continuing that challenge normally this would be a moment where something finally is revealed Yeah, or even or even not just an art but just this guy actually is it is a human being the some dimension of him that we can relate to at the human level and But actually it isn't so as you say he's just he's just he's just like he's he's taking on board the fact of my my crap fucking hell I'm gonna have to sorry language

Waitman (56:43.898)
Right. It's like, is there an arc or isn't there? You know, he's not actually making a journey.

Waitman (57:06.746)
It's fine.

Barry (57:06.962)
I'm going to have to kill half a million Hungarians in the next two months. How the hell am I going to get this done? Who wouldn't be stressed faced with such a work challenge? Yes. Yeah.

Waitman (57:14.97)
Yeah, and all eyes are on me, you know, like from, you know, like.

Waitman (57:21.914)
Yeah, I mean, and I, yeah, I mean, I think that that's an interesting way of thinking about it, you know, because I suspect that, you know, and this may be just someone who's not a film expert looking at it, but you know, if we think about the way that filmmakers play with our expectations, right, you know, as I suggest, the one expectation might be that we want to see the sort of other side of the wall. And so he kind of teases us by not showing us that, but also,

the idea that sort of we all want to think that humanity exists and that there is some shred of, you know, it's the Darth Vader is in the end good inside kind of, you know, idea. And, you know, maybe the point of this is to show that really two things, right? Because I would agree, and I would always make the argument when I'm teaching or talking about the Holocaust that, you know, 90 plus percent of perpetrators are not psychologically abnormal people. Like they're not psychopaths, right? They're not.

They're not clinical. They're not pathological. But also that it's possible just to be not a good humane person without being a sort of caricatured, you know, sadistic psychopath, which always is less challenging, I think, to us because then we can just say, well, that's a sadistic, crazy person. Whereas the person who's...

Barry (58:43.698)
Yeah, I agree about that very strongly and I agree therefore that characters like Amon Gert and Shinda Ziss, which is the one that's always held up as an example of this, are in that sense unhelpful, if that's the right way to put it, because they do allow us to conceive of the perpetrators as psychopaths, sadists, torturers, etc. And also, I suppose, as ideological fanatics in a very almost cartoon -y kind of way.

Guess what I would the criticism therefore that and yeah zone of interest doesn't do that but One could at least ask our argue or at least you could ask the question whether it doesn't still And at this point I've sort of made before whether it doesn't actually still represent or render perpetrators as Pathological not because of the not because of their frenzied

unremitting violence, but rather because of the almost the opposite of it. That the Huss family, as depicted in the film, still operate in a zone of extreme abnormality, extreme psychological abnormality, beyond the sort of, beyond simple indifference, beyond convenience. They exist in almost this sort of suspended alternate reality.

Waitman (59:53.498)
Yeah, a basic lack of empathy kind of, you know.

Barry (01:00:10.738)
And whether that actually reveals as much as we would like it to about the nature of the perpetrators is, I think, you know, debatable. I mean, over that historically, the proximity of social life to mass murder was probably the rule and not the exception in places like Auschwitz, in places like the Operation Reinhardt camps. I mean, those weren't, there were no families there, but there are...

images of the SS men there enjoying, you know, beers and sausage at the end of a hard day's work, at the end of a mass murder.

Waitman (01:00:51.994)
Well, in the in the in the book I just wrote in the on the North Sky camp in Lviv, you know, we have almost an identical situation. I mean, there's a common the commandant's villa is smack dab in the middle of the camp with a nice large garden around it, you know, and they had garden parties with like his wife and daughter. I mean, so in that sense, you know, I think it is the what the audience should not take away from it is how exceptional his family was more that.

This is a depiction of how exceptional it is that these families in all these places behave this way because it's a ramen.

Barry (01:01:26.386)
I think that that's probably, again, I don't think that it's helpful to gauge historical dramas by the extent to which they conform to scholarly understandings of the historical events in question. I think it's important they don't obviously willfully deform the history, but they shouldn't be, they're doing different work.

Waitman (01:01:45.626)
Right.

Barry (01:01:55.794)
than historical scholarship. But I think that if the aim of the film was to actually explore the ways in which a kind of arrested relationality or indifference or stunted empathy are the means by which enormous crimes can be perpetrated and maintained, it probably would have been helpful.

Waitman (01:01:56.122)
Correct.

Barry (01:02:22.514)
for us to have encountered a few more of the Huss's friends, a bit more of the community within which they exist, which actually is very much part of Amos's novel, although I'm not, as I said, I don't think it's a very good novel, but that is very much part of what he's looking at, the social life. I mean, there's a bit of that in the film, but there isn't a great deal of sense of the larger penumbra of...

Waitman (01:02:26.746)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Barry (01:02:51.058)
families and soldiers and wives and visiting dignitaries and all the rest of it who would have been in and out who were as we know from the visitor's book in and out of the Huss family house, you know, week in, week in, week out, all of them presumably operating with essentially the same kinds of acquired or willful indifference to their surroundings that the Huss family do.

Waitman (01:03:16.602)
Yeah, I mean, and again, you know, I think it's interesting this idea of space because I think for the viewer, the film feels very claustrophobic. But of course, the film would make the argument that for the people that live there, they don't necessarily feel sort of constrained by the garden, the wall, those kind of things. But you talked a little about the work of the film. And I want to get back to this point because, you know, you're someone that's worked in the industry and sort of has sort of...

Barry (01:03:44.85)
Just before we go to that, I just want to get on that point, but I think that's absolutely right. It's a very interesting one, which is that the film kind of slightly, you might say slightly perversely, positions the spectator in a place of limited mobility, which parallels the actual experience of the camp of living for the victims.

Waitman (01:03:46.938)
Yes, right.

Barry (01:04:14.61)
where you couldn't go from one zone to another, there was no safe passage between Canada and the crematoria and the women's camp or all of that. You couldn't just wander around. Whereas, of course, the perpetrators could. They could go wherever they wanted. But in this film, with the exception, as you mentioned, of that one single shot of us on the job in the camp,

Waitman (01:04:42.266)
and riding a horse and that kind of thing. But yeah, but.

Barry (01:04:43.57)
Yeah, other than that, they don't. And we don't either. We are trapped in the garden and the house, which is a sort of slightly... It's interesting. It's a weird kind of mismatch, if you like, where we are locked into an experience of entrapment, which is proper to the victims, but not actually proper to the perpetrators. But the perpetrators, not the victims, are the subject of this film.

Waitman (01:05:11.354)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's dead on. What I was asking earlier, just to, because you're someone that's worked technically in film, and that's something that obviously I have no expertise in, but clearly there are choices being made from a filming perspective. One that I noticed was the color, which seems intentionally kind of washed out, these kinds of things. But can you talk about some of the important, I suppose, technical choices? Because they obviously correspond to more,

meaning choices as well, right?

Barry (01:05:44.114)
Well, the most important and the most striking technical choice that Glazer and his production team made was to, if you like, film large parts of the film in the mode of a kind of reality show on TV, by which I mean that cameras were installed, not concealed, I don't think, but they were installed in fixed positions. So they, as you...

probably know, there's a lot of publicity about this, they reconstructed the Huss family house, pretty precisely according to its architectural blueprints, on a site a few hundred yards from the actual location of the house, which they couldn't film in. And therefore, many of the shots of the wall,

The guard towers beyond it and all the rest of it are actually green screen or digital composites. They're not literally filming on the actual boundary wall of the camp itself. But then within the reconstructed house, Glazer and his cinematographer, they installed fixed camera positions in key locations like the kitchen, the dining room.

bedroom, obviously the garden, but also the outside access to the garden. What this meant anyway was that the actors were able to play out scenes continuously over extended periods of the script. Now, if you know anything about how films are mostly shot, this is, they're mostly shot using single camera setups.

So when in a dialogue scene, for example, or let's say a character is in one room, they go out the door and we then find them in another room that they've gone into or an outside space, that will be two separate camera setups. And therefore the performance of the action by the actor will be discontinuous. They'll do what they do in the one room, exit that room, and then the director will shout cut. And at a subsequent point, either that day or another day, whenever it suits them,

Barry (01:08:03.634)
they will pick up the reverse shot, if you like, of the actor exiting the house and then it will be seamlessly edited together. In the case of this film, those performances are continuous because the cameras are running continuously, so the actors could play their parts, move from room to room in the knowledge that their performances would be recorded without them needing to, and without them knowing when actually Glazer was going to call cut. They would simply, you know,

carry on playing. And I suppose the idea here was to give the performers every opportunity to inhabit the reality of their characters without giving either them or I suppose us the respite of a cut, of a break. And I think therefore that claustrophobic...

Waitman (01:08:54.65)
Mm -hmm.

Barry (01:08:58.482)
dimension that you refer to is an important part actually facilitated by that technical choice.

Waitman (01:09:09.722)
Yeah, I mean, and it seems like maybe also for the viewer, you know, in some ways that's a more, and I'm using realistic here in scare quotes, but a realistic way of seeing, because that would be the way that we would see the room, in the sense that we're not gonna zoom in on a face, we're not gonna, you know, zoom in on a particular element, which as you point out, the film doesn't do a whole lot of.

Barry (01:09:33.426)
Well, it doesn't because it can't. It's not absolutely ubiquitous. For example, there is one quite long tracking shot during one of the garden scenes where the camera is clearly on rails and it's moving alongside the action in a more conventional sort of way. But again, if anybody listening to this isn't clear about what we're talking about, I would recommend that you just watch any, literally any mainstream show on...

You know Netflix or a mainstream movie and just notice that any individual let's say interior scene Just choose one at random. You'll see how many different camera positions there are in the dialogue scene, especially now because filmmaking is very very cutty cutty and So dialogue scene directors are terrified of boring their audiences. So dialogue scenes tend to be you'll have lots and lots of different camera positions close -ups on actors

Waitman (01:10:11.386)
Yeah

Barry (01:10:28.594)
single shots of somebody talking somebody then a matching show somebody reactions and then cut to a two shot of two people talking together etc the whole thing will be very busy whereas visually the scenes in the zone of interest are the opposite of busy there they're they're framed actors move towards or away from the camera the camera doesn't follow them we only follow them when they move into a different space and therefore can be picked up by the camera

within that space. So I think there's an unease, even if we're not fully aware of it as we start to watch the film, there's an unease from the lack of visual variety that we're more familiar with from conventional contemporary filmmaking.

Waitman (01:11:16.762)
And does that, because I'm just thinking as a viewer, and one of the effects that that has now that I reflect on it with you describing it that way is that you are able, your eyes are able to roam around the space in a way that you can't if it's, you know, speaker, speaker. And so you're kind of, it's not that you're not paying attention to the so -called action, but you're also, you're looking around the space because it's all kind of appearing in this box.

you know is

Barry (01:11:47.026)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I should also say that, if I'm given the impression that there was only ever a single camera in one of these spaces, that's also not the case. I mean, if you look at the scene that you mentioned earlier, where Mrs. Hirst is trying on the fur coat, she discovers a lipstick in the pocket, tries it on. The bedroom was equipped with multiple cameras. So again, as far as the actor is concerned, she had to assume...

not only that she was continuously on, but that she was as it were on from different angles simultaneously. But definitely there is that sense of us being in a consistent space from which there was no escape.

Waitman (01:12:34.01)
Yeah, I mean, and I guess another question that probably comes up for viewers as well is, you know, we talked a little bit about the, so there's a, I suppose it's kind of a jarring interjection into the film, which are these scenes at night of a woman who we take to sort of be a resistor or someone trying to help the prisoners by essentially hiding apples and food for them to find.

And interestingly, it takes place at the same time as Hesse's reading the bedtime story to his children. But the technical piece that takes place here is it's shot essentially in what looks to be thermals. So that it's white hot thermal where things that are hot are white and everything else is dark. But it's a stark visual change from anything that we see going on with Hesse and his family. So what do you make of that?

Why are they doing that, do you think?

Barry (01:13:30.77)
I mean, so Glazer has said publicly that the choice to use, and you're absolutely right, it was nighttime thermal imagery to record the scenes whereby the Polish servant girl leaves apples distributed around the area, I guess, the kind of perimeter of the camp for some of the slave workers to find sub -assocately and bolster their diet during the day. He's just explained that in terms of...

Again, wanting to be able to film in this sort of continuous fashion and not use lights and not use artificial lights to shoot in the darkness. But I kind of don't buy that, actually, because there are ways to shoot in low light conditions, particularly with contemporary equipment and without the use of artificial lights. And the visual intrusion.

of those sequences is so stark. It's such a disruption to the prevailing tenor of the film that I think it can't simply be explained away as a technical choice. I mean, those scenes, the scenes of the, as you mentioned, I think, the scenes of the Polish girl with the apples are intercut with scenes of Huss reading his youngest daughter a good night's story, a fair, a...

child's story, a fairy's story. And they therefore come across, at least that's when I first saw the film, I initially interpreted them as some sort of, if you like, almost like a dream sequence or child's eye vision of the story that she was being read to. And it's very hard, I think, you know, we are clearly being invited to render them. I think in terms of the larger thematics of the film, one possible way of reading

Waitman (01:15:09.402)
Yeah.

Barry (01:15:26.546)
the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

What you might say is that the bulk of the film involves us looking in a fairly dispassionate way, evenly lit, carefully framed and conventionally shot way at people acting in ways that are unthinkable. People acting in ways that challenge our understandings of what it basically means to be a

if you like, a functional human being. In that context, when somebody like the Polish girl chooses to act in ways that are humane, and after all, she's not picking up a, you know, she's not strucking hand grenades here. She's, you know, she's doing something which is brave in the context of who she is and where she is, but in any other context, kind of, you know, relatively small, but caring gesture of, you know, human,

compassion and solidarity. In the context of this place, such an action completely distorts the visual sensorium. And it, if you like, mandates an estrangement of the image track. Exactly, exactly so. Yeah, that's a much more concise way and apt way of putting it than I achieved. Thank you very much for that. Yes.

Waitman (01:17:11.194)
Or it's like the photo negative of morality in a certain sense, right? It's like the opposite sort of.

Waitman (01:17:20.57)
No, I mean, I think it's really interesting, you know, because it does just sort of pop in there, but it makes you think. I guess as we're coming a little bit towards the end, can I ask...

does this fit into sort of the history of Holocaust film? You know, is it, do you think that that Glazer is intentionally engaging with other films about the Holocaust? And if so, maybe how is he doing that? Or is he, you know, not, is he just going his completely own way?

Barry (01:17:53.01)
I think it's a pretty idiosyncratic film. And by the way, as we are getting to the end, we probably should maybe briefly discuss the end of the film, which tends maybe not to get discussed quite as much. I mean, I'm talking about the Auschwitz Museum sequence at the end. But I think it's a pretty idiosyncratic film. And...

Waitman (01:18:05.914)
right, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, sorry.

Barry (01:18:17.01)
There is, of course, an iconography, if you like, of Holocaust film, which you might say, well, that's bound to be because the camps had guard towers and trains arrived at them and so on and so forth. At the same time, there are various iconographic markers that since the earliest accounts of the concentration camps, let's say the films of the liberated Belsen and Dachau, for example, made by the Allies in the immediate, right at the war's end.

filmmakers have chosen to focus on certain kind of specific attributes rather than others. Now Auschwitz has acquired its own set of iconographic markers from which this film rather, it seems to me, explicitly chooses not to invoke, whether that's the Arbeitmacht frei gate at Auschwitz 1, whether it's the gatehouse at Auschwitz -Birkenau.

Waitman (01:19:10.554)
Mm -hmm.

Barry (01:19:15.722)
obviously the landscape of the barracks and we don't see any of that, therefore it doesn't sort of go there. I suppose if we weren't familiar with those iconographic markers, then things like the guard tower or like the train and the plume of smoke from this, the steam from the smokestack that we see billowing up beyond the garden walls, which incidentally are, I'm sure many people,

but we'll be aware that there's an imaginative geography to this film which does not at all comport to the other. Yeah, the train tracks are nowhere near Auschwitz 1. Yeah, exactly, that's right, all of that kind of thing. But the audience wouldn't read or be able to read those elements as meaningfully as they do were it not for the prior work of many, many films, including Schindler's List and numerous others. Other than that, I think that...

Waitman (01:19:48.186)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The train tracks don't, don't drive anywhere near his house.

Barry (01:20:14.642)
You can, as we said at the outset, you can certainly put the zone of interest, I think, in a category of film which seeks to develop a not entirely new, of course, but at least differentiated language for rendering the Holocaust and in particular the mass extermination in the camps, which seeks to develop a kind of differentiated audiovisual language in doing that.

compared to more mainstream films on the subject. So I think you could put, in that sense, there's only interest alongside Shoah, alongside Night and Fog, alongside Son of Saul, all very different from one another, but all seeking to, all taking the view that this is a subject matter that can't simply be approached in the, just using the straightforward conventions that Avengers Endgame, for example, is made using.

Waitman (01:21:07.706)
Right, right. And we should absolutely, you're 100 % correct, we should absolutely talk about the end because that's if there are sort of jarring sequences, there's sort of like the beginning with the sound, the middle sequences with the girl and the apples. And then the end when the film literally cuts to the sort of janitorial cleaning staff in the Auschwitz One sort of museum today, which is another very jarring piece, which

doesn't immediately, and this is where you come in because you're the expert, which doesn't immediately have sort of a clear didactic meaning to it. It doesn't really tell us exactly. We're kind of like, why are we here? What's going on here? So what are your thoughts on?

Barry (01:21:52.466)
Yeah, this is an aspect of the film which I'm slightly more inclined to give Glazer the benefit of the doubt than some of my colleagues who've seen this as a kind of rather jarring sort of commemorative gesture, never again, let us not forget this really happened at the end of the film. And I don't think that it is that. I mean, I think if it were that, that would be really at odds with the intelligence of the film as a whole, even if I've got some reservations about it. I think that probably rather it is actually...

Waitman (01:22:09.434)
Right.

Barry (01:22:21.81)
If you remember what we're actually seeing in those brief scenes when we cut to the Auschwitz Museum, we're looking at the janitorial staff cleaning the displays. And, you know, as it were, whether it's the start of a day or the end of a day, it's not clear, but they're either, you know, they're preparing them any for the next influx of tourists. And I think that the scenes could be read either in relation to what we've seen of the Hirst family and the, if you like, the possibility of rendering this history of

horror, containing it, you know, behind glass, in glass vitrines, ready for the, what Bresch would I guess call the kind of the culinary consumption, you know, the sort of not really very considered contemplation by tens of thousands of tourists every year. I mean, that would be one maybe warning. Or perhaps also, it's not completely different.

one might see the scenes in the museum as a caution against the anodyne memorialisation of atrocity, in which cinema can be as complicit as anything else. And maybe even this film could be argued to be complicit. This very studied, careful, artful film could in its own way be argued to be just as

I won't use the word guilty, but just as culpable of rendering this atrocious past in a way that is, let's say, kind of suitable for framing, if you know what I mean. And that, you know, the museum, the musealization of Auschwitz is potentially part of the process whereby history of inconceivable awfulness and moral enormity.

Waitman (01:24:04.954)
Yeah.

Barry (01:24:20.434)
is rendered palatable to us.

Waitman (01:24:22.778)
Yeah, absolutely. And there's also this interesting sort of parallel of cleaning as a theme. We could probably talk about this for a whole other podcast, but this theme of cleaning and cleanliness throughout the entire film, you know, even beginning at the very beginning, which sort of shows the staff in the house, in the Hess house, getting ready for visitors and cleaning. And then at the end, you have cleaning for different kinds of visitors. But like it's, yeah.

Barry (01:24:42.738)
Yeah, and there's and and and we see

Yeah, and we see, we see, we see her's boots being cleaned off of presumably like mud and blood and so forth. At the end of the day, we see her, I mean, towards the end of the film, we see her cleaning his genitals after he's, let's say raped, in fact, a, you know, a young Jewish female, inmate. And of course there's the, there's the, the, the, the, you know, the, the scrubbing that has to go on after the family have, after her son, his.

kids have accidentally been contaminated by the human remains in the river. So yes, there is absolutely a theme of hygiene in the film. And of course, hygiene is a super loaded term historically in this context as well.

Waitman (01:25:27.066)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, gosh, this was amazing. It's really great to talk to somebody who is an expert, you know, sort of on this, because it puts it I think it puts the film in a completely sort of different level. What's close with the question that I always ask of all of my guests, which is, you know, what is one book on the Holocaust that you think is particularly important and particularly meaningful? You recommend to our listeners.

Barry (01:25:51.858)
Sure, and when you said you were going to ask me this question, Wade, you did remind me that I was just allowed to say what I was thinking of today. It doesn't have to be the one book that I've written. I will give you two books, if that's okay. One of which is a book that I've read many times and am doing some work with in a creative way, actually, at the moment. And I think it's directly relevant to what we've been talking about, as a matter of fact. And that's Gita Serenis' Into That Darkness, which is her...

Waitman (01:25:58.746)
Yes, there's no right or wrong answer to this question.

Barry (01:26:20.658)
book -length study based on the interviews that she conducted with Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, which she conducted with him in prison in Frankfurt, or was it Düsseldorf, sorry, I can't remember, shortly before his death in 1970. And as a study of perpetrated psychology and the extraordinary moral and psychological contortions that somebody goes through in order to basically...

exculpate themselves or simply remove themselves from what they're doing on a daily basis. I think that that film, sorry, that book is truly remarkable. I think reading that alongside watching the zone of interest would be a very interesting experience for anybody who hasn't read the book. The other book that I read for the first time and much more recently is, and I'm sure many of your contributors are probably talking about this book, is Dan Stone's

Waitman (01:27:04.314)
Hmm.

Barry (01:27:16.466)
recent history of the Holocaust, the Holocaust and unfinished history, which is published in Pelican early last year, which I think, you know, represents absolutely the leading, it's a synoptic overview of the Holocaust, but it covers an enormous amount of ground. It includes the territory such as contemporary commemoration and cultural representation. And it's a book of extraordinarily, extraordinary intellectual sophistication, which also represents the leading edge, I think, of, you know, current

Historic Holocaust Scholarship and I don't think that anybody who's seriously interested in this topic could really go for long without reading that one.

Waitman (01:27:53.85)
Well, thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, please.

Barry (01:27:55.122)
And I'm sorry, and to say that Dan is obviously a colleague of mine who are Holloway's. So just a full disclosure there, but.

Waitman (01:28:00.858)
It's okay. Dan's amazing. I love his stuff. For our listeners, again, please do. Some of you have already done this, but if you haven't, please take a minute. Go to Apple Podcasts, give us a rating and a comment if this is a, if you're finding it enjoyable is the wrong word, but if you're finding engaging, interesting, thought provoking. Barry, thank you so much for coming on. Your comments and your experience and your

reflectionless film I think have really made it mean a lot more and certainly for our viewers as well. So thank you so much.

Barry (01:28:38.034)
You're very welcome. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for asking me.