Holocaust and the Nazi Era

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      Menachem Daum, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim, Dies at 77

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      His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Occupied City’ Review: Mapping the Holocaust, Street by Street

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      In his four-and-half-hour documentary, the British director Steve McQueen charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.Early in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary documentary “Occupied City,” the film cuts to the interior of the elegant main hall in Amsterdam’s grand Royal Concertgebouw. In World War II, the Nazi-German occupiers held events in the hall, but at some point in 1942 the names of the Jewish composers adorning it were covered. Concerts continued, but without Jewish composers, conductors, orchestra musicians, concertgoers and even names on walls.Not long after this section ends, “Occupied City” shifts to a new location, a nondescript, boarded-up storefront. This, the narrator explains, was the site of a cafe that, in 1940, was among the first in the city to ban Jews. Soon after, the movie cuts to another location and then to another and another. And so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address.In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019. These 35-millimeter visuals are, in turn, accompanied by sounds that include voices, birdsong and so on recorded during the filming; fragments of music (some composed by Oliver Coates); and the narration (delivered in the English-language version with dry equanimity by Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor).McQueen’s decision to only use images of contemporary Amsterdam in the film is as effective as it is conceptually bold, though it takes time to fully grasp what he’s doing and why. Without ceremony, textual explanation or a flourish of introductory music, he drops you into the city’s gentle and clamorous bustle right from the get go, and there you remain even as the film hopscotches across Amsterdam, covering miles and years. The movie opens, for instance, with a daytime shot of a warmly lit hallway in what looks like an apartment, with a door opened onto a garden. It’s quiet save for the homey sounds of rustling, the metallic tinkling of what seems like silverware and some faintly babbling voices, perhaps from a radio or TV.An unidentified woman enters, and the narration — as it does throughout — begins with a recitation of an address, which grounds you. This was once the office of a printer-publisher who, with his wife and two sisters, died by suicide on May 15, 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. As the woman onscreen opens a trapdoor, the narrator continues, recounting that while many Jews hoped to escape to England, “most could not find a boat willing to take them.” The dead man’s brother did escape, and he transferred the business to an employee, who helped Jews hide in the office. One hid for days “on top of the elevator.”McQueen continues this approach for the remainder of the film, though with striking variations that create linkages, by turns obvious and oblique. In one sunny segment, a cozy spell of pleasure and play becomes a ghost story as you watch people skating on a frozen canal outside a building where a woman sheltered Jewish residents and resistance fighters. Elsewhere, though, McQueen folds in images without commentary, notably in scenes of people protesting against pandemic lockdowns, met by police with water cannons. These images raise the specter of state violence even as the film — with its relentless, harrowing narration — puts the protesters and their freedoms into historical context.As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. A pilot who shot down German planes before the Netherlands capitulated lived at one address; a 10-month-old baby was taken from another address to a police station; the following year, the baby was murdered at Auschwitz. Amsterdam, McQueen repeatedly reminds you, is occupied by both the living and the dead, an obvious point that takes on specific, deeply profound resonance as the film unfolds. Most of Netherland’s Jewish population, as the narrator reminds you, died in the Holocaust.Among these, alas and of course, was Anne Frank, who’s mentioned a few times in “Occupied City.” It’s notable, I think, that McQueen doesn’t include Prinsengracht 263, the building where her father’s employees kept the business running while she, her family and four others hid in the annex until they were betrayed and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The building is now a tourist attraction, which might be one reason that McQueen avoids it. I imagine that he also wanted to distance the film from the popular, commercially palatable conception of Frank, the one that seizes on her diary’s most famous line — “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” — and can attenuate the barbarism of her murder.McQueen’s film is “informed,” as the credits put it, by Bianca Stigter’s huge 2019 book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which she described in an interview with the BBC as “a kind of travel guide to the past of Amsterdam.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, and McQueen, who’s British, are married and live in the Netherlands.) She wrote and helped produce “Occupied City,” and she also directed “A Lengthening: Three Minutes” (2022), a feature-length documentary about a segment of a home movie that an American tourist, David Kurtz, shot in 1938 of a Jewish community in a Polish village. Using only images from this fragment, Stigter movingly reclaims a lost world, face by face, second by second.Time is stretched differently in “Occupied City” and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. It’s instructive, for one, that he hasn’t shaped the narration chronologically. Instead, as the film shifts from address to address, and as the seasons and people pass by onscreen, the narration skips from 1940 to 1944 and back again, pausing in moments before and after the war. For McQueen, history isn’t a neat little package that can be experienced at a safe remove and then forgotten. Here, history is in every wintry park and sunlit room because it is insistently present and very much alive.Occupied CityRated PG-13. Running time: 4 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. 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      In Steve McQueen’s ‘Occupied City,’ a Marriage of Art and History

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      Steve McQueen collaborated with his wife Bianca Stigter to make “Occupied City,” a four-hour documentary that brings Amsterdam’s World War II history into the present day.When the British filmmaker Steve McQueen was considering making a feature film about a free man who was captured and sold into slavery, his wife, the Dutch journalist and historian Bianca Stigter, suggested he start with a true story.She found a 1853 memoir by a New York man who was kidnapped, sold and enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana, named Solomon Northup. McQueen was immediately intrigued. “What was so interesting about it was that the script was there,” he said last week, over lunch with Stigter in Amsterdam. “I didn’t have to invent a story.”His resulting 2013 feature film, “12 Years a Slave,” adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, won three Academy Awards, including best picture.For the couple, it was just one example of a kind of creative symbiosis that has defined their 28-year relationship. In 2022, when Stigter made her first film, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a documentary based on rare footage of a Polish village before the Holocaust, McQueen was a co-producer and “a sounding board,” she said.Over 187 days, McQueen and his team shot 960,000 feet of film showing daily life in Amsterdam.Lennert Hillege/A24McQueen’s latest film, the four-hour documentary “Occupied City,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Dec. 25, is the couple’s most extensive collaboration to date. He adapted the movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, from Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie’s producers.Stigter’s reference book records the geographical dimensions of that period of Nazi rule in Amsterdam — where the bombs dropped, where rallies were held — but it also memorializes places where Dutch people suffered and died: soup kitchens during the 1944 to 1945 famine known as the Hunger Winter; apartments where Jewish families committed suicide; and public squares, train stations, a theater and a day care center where Jews were held before their deportation to concentration camps.In “Occupied City,” Stigter’s text is read out in unemotional voice-over by the British actor Melanie Hyams, while the camera shows scenes from contemporary Amsterdam. But because it was mostly shot from 2020 to 2022, much of the footage captures the city during Covid-19 lockdowns.McQueen, who was born and raised in London, is both a filmmaker and a Turner Prize-winning visual artist, recognized by Queen Elizabeth with a knighthood in 2022. But he has lived a more under-the-radar life in Amsterdam, Stigter’s hometown, since the late 1990s. The couple raised their two children in the city, though they declined to discuss how they met or when, precisely, they got married.He said that he has always felt Amsterdam’s cityscape represented layers of history that must be excavated, from the 17th century, when it was the hub of Golden Age Holland, up through the horrors of World War II. “There are always archaeological digs going on in your brain as you walk the streets,” he said. He’d long wanted to make a film that simultaneously engaged the present and the past.The footage was then overlaid with a voice-over drawn from Stigter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”Lennert Hillege/A24Around 2004, McQueen said, he was conceptualizing a film that might somehow draw the city’s World War II past into the contemporary moment.“I had this idea to physically map one image over the other,” McQueen said, “to illuminate the ghosts from the past.” He heard the tapping of keys from the next room, he recalled, where Stigter was writing the first version of her “Atlas,” and thought: “What if the past is text and the images of now are now?”McQueen set out to shoot every address in Stigter’s book — more than 2,000 locations — and the filming was planned long before any signs of the pandemic. But when lockdowns in the Netherlands began in March 2020, McQueen decided to go on undeterred.“It was like the way Dutch people still just go out into the streets and cycle when it’s raining — the weather doesn’t change the plan,” he said. “We just had to embrace it.”For two and a half years, McQueen and his crew shot on location, producing 960,000 feet of film, he said, far more than he would need, even for a long documentary. Stigter sometimes attended the filming, but not always. “It felt a little like I was in the way,” she said.Shooting was planned before the coronavirus pandemic, and carried on throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. “We just had to embrace it,” McQueen said.Lennert Hillege/A24Some of the shots show quotidian activities, suggesting that life goes on, oblivious to the past. We see a shuttered H&M store, where we learn that young Dutch volunteers once stood in line to register for the Waffen S.S. People joyfully play in the snow and walk their dogs in the Sarphatipark, where one of the final roundups of Jews took place in 1943.But filming during the pandemic meant that the life captured by the cameras wasn’t ever entirely ordinary. Sometimes, the drama unfolding in the present moment reminds us that we remain as vulnerable to catastrophe as ever, as in a scene where elderly Dutch citizens line up for Covid vaccinations.At other times, wartime themes and contemporary visuals converge in unusual and unsettling ways, like when hundreds of unmasked protesters gather on Museumplein, a central square in the museum district, in early 2021, to decry the new masking regulations. The protesters are forced out of the square by police on horseback, and using water cannons and dogs.It is ambiguous whether the footage is suggesting a link between the World War II era and Covid times. This is a touchy moral question, because protesters and far-right Dutch politicians have, in recent years, made false equivalencies between the Holocaust and the government’s Covid-19 regulations.Yet McQueen said that such onscreen convergences were merely an attempt by the viewer to “make sense out of nonsense.”“I wanted the screen to be a mirror where people saw themselves reflected back on them, so you ask: Who am I in this?” he said. “It’s more of a meditation than a history lesson.”“Occupied City,” which includes 130 of Stigter’s addresses, clocks in at 247 minutes, plus a 15-minute intermission. But this is not the end of the project for McQueen and Stigter. He was in the process of planning a future artwork, which he said would attempt to include every address in the book. For Stigter and McQueen, the process of bringing the “Occupied City” to the public — as a book and a film, and soon an artwork, as well — has been a shared labor of love, which, like their relationship, is an ongoing conversation.“I’ve been with this woman for 28 years and without those 28 years, this artwork would never have been made,” McQueen said. “It was just the case that we live together, we share our lives together, and this is one of the things that has come out of it, along with two children. It’s never been an effort. It’s only been a mutual appreciation.” More

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      How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

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      Poetry makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it. Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a conspiracy of silence was established. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.What definitively broke it, in the late 1970s, was — of all things — an NBC miniseries starring Meryl Streep. Crude, contrived and overblown, “Holocaust” is not a work of art; by today’s standards, it is barely even a work of television. Nonetheless, the show’s graphic depiction of the death camps, unprecedented at the time, shocked a vast global audience into belated recognition. Fifteen years later, the process of mnemonic restitution was completed by “Schindler’s List.” Released to stratospheric acclaim in 1993 and seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Steven Spielberg’s movie triggered a commemorative boom. For members of the newly united, post-Cold War Europe, Holocaust remembrance became an unofficial civic creed, or in the words of the historian Tony Judt, “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum. The action, such as it is, charts the daily round of what appears to be a normal German family. The paterfamilias, a baby-faced bureaucrat with a high-and-tight hairdo, goes off punctually to work each morning, while his blond and fertile wife — a mother of five — stays home to raise the kids. On weekends, there are parties in their walled garden, with its wading pool and beds of dahlias and roses, or excursions to their nearby lake house. From a distance, they seem to be living a version of the good life, and as the hausfrau insists during a rare moment of disharmony (the prospect of a move has just been raised), “We’re living how we dreamed we would. … Beyond how we dreamed.” There’s just one catch: Her husband is none other than Rudolf Höss, the long-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and their attractive villa looks out over the camp. Such a premise may strike some viewers as unsalvageably grotesque, and Glazer himself spent a good part of the nine years it took to make the film wondering if he was doing something he ought not to. His doubts were assuaged only during postproduction, when he discovered Rose’s essay, with its appeal for a cinematic treatment of the Nazi mind. She seemed to be describing the film he’d just shot — or, as he put it, the one he was currently “rewriting” in the edit suite. “It was incredibly reassuring,” he told me. “It gave me the confidence to believe in my own instincts, the confidence to complete the film.” Glazer, a gangly man in his late 50s with hazel eyes and a mop of graying hair, had met me at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he was spending time between appearances at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto in early September. So far, it seems, his instincts have been validated. “The Zone of Interest” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and the early reviews have been rapturous. Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said — in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”Jonathan Glazer (left) on the set of “The Zone of Interest.”Agata GrzybowskaIn doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster — Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that “The Zone of Interest” seeks to recover. Bracing for a backlash that had yet to transpire, Glazer was surprised at the film’s positive reception. “I suppose to some extent it must be due to the state of the world,” he mused, referring to the fit of racist populism seizing the West. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas. During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”Whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an exceptional event — different in kind, not just degree, from all genocides before or since — will naturally determine how you think it ought to be portrayed, or whether you think it ought to be portrayed at all. “We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi-Yar,” Wiesel wrote of NBC’s “Holocaust” in a coruscating piece for The New York Times. “We see the naked bodies covered with ‘blood’ — and it is all make-believe.” Such techniques may be appropriate for other historical films, but when it came to the subject at hand (which was “not just another event”), they amounted to a kind of sacrilege. “Auschwitz cannot be explained,” he insisted, “nor can it be visualized.” Of course, you don’t have to be an exceptionalist to sense there may be something morally dubious about making entertainment out of mass death, or in the complacent assumption that the means of cinema are commensurable with that task. Claude Lanzmann’s magisterial documentary “Shoah” (1985), which famously abjures archival footage of the camps in favor of oral testimony from survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, can be understood in part as a rebuttal to the guileless verisimilitude of “Holocaust.” At nine and a half hours, it was never going to reach as wide an audience as the American TV show, but the way it foregrounds the limits of its representational powers set a standard of artistic integrity against which all subsequent Holocaust films would be measured.Most of those films, it must be said, have taken their cues more from the NBC series than from Lanzmann’s documentary. “Schindler’s List,” “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) and “The Pianist” (2002), to name just a few, are unalike in many ways, but they all take for granted that the horrors they portray are accessible to cinema. These films have, to their credit, contributed to the de-erasure of the Holocaust, but they have also produced a distorted and simplistic understanding of history. To center the victims, as most films do, makes both moral and commercial sense, but it leaves us in the dark about the perpetrators. In general, the Nazis are drawn as stock villains: They do evil because they are evil. Some may say that there is wisdom, and decorum, in leaving it at that. In an addendum to his Auschwitz memoir “The Truce” (1963), the writer Primo Levi tries to answer the question “How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?” but ends up drawing an eloquent blank. “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify,” he wrote. To understand someone means, in some sense, to identify with him, but for a normal person to identify with Hitler and the Nazi top brass, Levi continues, is impossible. “This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counterhuman.”This timeless-sounding passage, it’s worth remembering, was written at a specific historical moment, some 30 years before the belated boom in Holocaust memory got going. To grant understanding to the perpetrators in the 60s, before their victims had been widely recognized as such, may have struck Levi as improper. It’s instructive to compare his proscription with the words of another great chronicler of Auschwitz, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz, who admired him deeply. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life … and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” Kertesz wrote in an essay from 1998, which condemns “Schindler’s List,” among other works, in terms that echo Rose’s critique. He was thinking, he continued, of “those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”Glazer, who steeped himself in Holocaust cinema and history, told me that he is not an exceptionalist. “I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” he said. A few days before we met in Los Angeles, he was in Telluride, where the traces of Native American culture reminded him that Hitler had drawn inspiration from Manifest Destiny, an ideology whose death toll, by conservative estimates, numbers in the tens of millions. When I asked why he decided to tackle the Holocaust, he said it was probably rooted in his family history. Glazer’s grandparents were Eastern European Jews who fled the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. Although his parents weren’t religious, they sent him to a Jewish state school in their North London neighborhood. Bricks were sometimes tossed into the playground by local children bleating slurs.His first knowledge of the Holocaust arrived early, at age 10 or 11, when he came across pictures of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogroms of November 1938, in an old issue of National Geographic. Without understanding what he was looking at, he noticed his physical resemblance to the people in the photos — the ones on their knees, that is, scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping up debris. The expressions on the faces of the bystanders, some of whom seemed exhilarated by what they were seeing, others merely indifferent, left him in a state of bewildered alarm. Glazer’s work often yields a similar response. His signature dread is present in its rawest form in some of the music videos he made at the start of his career. In the video for Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” a car pursues a fleeing man down a country road at dusk. The camera, which looks out from the driver’s seat over the car’s sharklike hood, seems to take a lingering delight in the man’s flailing limbs and heaving torso — and to tempt us into doing the same. The unnerving suggestion of collusion recurs throughout Glazer’s acclaimed, and utterly dissimilar, feature films: “Sexy Beast” (2000), a gangster movie-cum-surrealist nightmare; “Birth” (2004), a supernatural melodrama; and “Under the Skin” (2013), a work of sci-fi mumblecore with visionary intent. In the latter, Scarlett Johansson, disguised in a black wig, plays a dead-eyed alien who drives the streets of Glasgow in search of eligible men to take home with her. Once she gets them there, things turn deadly, and aggressively surreal. Glazer used hidden cameras and nonprofessional actors, most of whom had no idea they were participating in a film. (Chris Oddy, Glazer’s longtime production designer, described his freewheeling M.O. as one of “jazz filmmaking.”) It sounds like a Situationist prank and, in lesser hands, may well have become one. Instead, Glazer spun his materials into a kind of extraterrestrial docufiction, which bristles with the random poetry of street life. Shortly after finishing that film, Glazer came across a newspaper preview of a forthcoming Martin Amis novel, “The Zone of Interest.” Another story about an enigmatic predator, the book is narrated in part by a fictional commandant of Auschwitz. The perspective intrigued him, and after reading the novel in galleys he optioned it. To call the film an adaptation would be putting it too strongly, however. Much of the novel, which centers on a love triangle involving the commandant, Paul Doll; his wife, Hannah; and one of Doll’s subordinates, struck Glazer as superfluous, including the love triangle itself. He seems to have been more interested in Amis’s source material than in what Amis did with it. The Dolls were based, loosely, on the Hösses, and Glazer’s first big call was to revert to the originals. Before starting work on the script, he spent two years researching them, during which he came across a staggering data point: The garden of their villa shared a wall with the camp. What feats of denial, he wondered, would it have taken to live in such proximity to the damned?Glazer found a clue to the answer in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which he’d hired a pair of researchers to scour for information on the Hösses, the more quotidian the better. According to the testimony of the family gardener, the couple had a blowout argument one day in the summer of 1943 after Rudolf learned he was about to be transferred to an SS office near Berlin. Hedwig, the gardener recalled, was apoplectic at the idea of leaving their rural hideaway. For the Hösses, who in their youth were members of an idealistic back-to-the-land movement, life in Auschwitz was something of an idyll, Glazer came to grasp. This stunning reality comes through in his imaginative reconstruction of their quarrel. “They’d have to drag me out of here,” Hedwig says after hearing the news. “Everything the führer said about how to live is how we do. Go east. Living space. This is our living space.”A still from “The Zone of Interest.”Photograph from A24In his book “Black Earth” (2015), the historian Timothy Snyder argues that the concept of living space, or lebensraum, carried two distinct but related meanings: on the one hand, “a living room, the dream of household comfort”; on the other, a “habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human.” Glazer read the book while working on his script, and his depiction of the Hösses as both creatures of household comfort and pioneers on a grand historical mission clearly chimes with Snyder’s thesis. It’s indicative of just how thoroughly he inhabits their moral universe that neither husband nor wife at any point betray the slightest hint of bad conscience. The idea that they lost sleep over what they were doing, Glazer said, is without foundation, as is the assumption that we are ethically superior to the Germans of the Nazi era. “If states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed toward murder,” Snyder writes, “few of us would behave well.” Lanzmann’s “Shoah” has spawned a slender but vital countertradition in Holocaust cinema, one founded on the principle that formal rigor is inseparable from moral truth. You can see the principle at work in a recent film like “Son of Saul” (2015), by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, which follows a day in the life of an Auschwitz sonderkommando, a member of the group of inmates who were forced to remove the corpses from the gas chambers. The film consists of smothering close-ups of the lead actor, Geza Rohrig. The horrors of the camp remain either out of focus or outside the frame: We read them off Rohrig’s reactions, or more often, his lack of reaction.The influence of “Shoah” is also palpable in “The Zone of Interest,” which makes a similar formal choice: to keep the camera on the civilian side of the wall. “I don’t think they should be represented,” Glazer said of the film’s unpictured atrocities. “I don’t think they can be represented.” The idea of simulating violence (“extras in striped pajamas being beaten”) struck him not only as distasteful (“and then the extra is there later in the catering tent, eating his apple and custard”) but also as redundant. Forty-five years after NBC’s “Holocaust,” images of the camps have become a cheapened visual currency. The stifling sound design, by Johnnie Burn — an aural froth of gunshots, dog barks and human shouts and screams — is all we need to visualize the horror for ourselves. Glazer shot most of the film in summer 2021. Drawing on extensive research, Oddy spent the previous few months meticulously converting a derelict home just beyond the camp’s perimeter wall into a replica of the Höss house. (The actual house, a few doors down, which would have been Glazer’s first choice, has been a private residence almost since the end of the war.) Oddy began planting the garden, previously a stretch of wasteland, in early April, so that everything flowered in time for the shoot. When Friedel, Hüller and the rest of the cast and crew arrived, they were taken aback. “It was like walking into 1943,” one of them told me.The goal was an immersive naturalism, and Glazer went to great lengths pursuing it. By using multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously throughout the house, he gave his actors an extraordinary freedom to improvise; they were often unaware if the cameras were even rolling. Glazer remained outside, holed up in a shipping container decked out with monitors. “Cinema is at odds with atrocity,” he said, explaining his approach. “As soon as you put a camera on someone, as soon as you light them, or make a decision about what lens to use, you’re glamorizing them.” Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, arrived early to the shoot and made some initial studies of the house. Glazer told him they were “too beautiful.” He wanted the images to seem “authorless.”Friedel’s first major role came in 2009, when he appeared in “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s haunting film about a German village on the eve of World War I. He told me that the two directors could not be less alike. “Haneke knows everything from the beginning,” he said. “When I read the script of ‘The White Ribbon,’ I thought, This is perfect. The shooting process was to shoot the script, and there were no surprises.” Glazer, by contrast, is more open to chance. “He wasn’t thinking, OK, this is a great script, let’s do it,” Friedel went on. “He was searching every moment. He was always asking, Is there something I don’t know?”Often there was. The moment when Rudolf breaks the news to Hedwig that he is being transferred away from Auschwitz comes during a casual get-together in the Höss garden. Glazer’s open-ended instruction to the supporting cast of friends and family was simply, “Have a party.” For the next three hours, they mingled on the lawn and splashed in the pool as Friedel and Hüller moved among them, trying out their lines. Occasionally Glazer stepped in to offer notes, but mostly he allowed them to improvise and experiment. “It’s like children playing,” Friedel said of the director’s hands-off approach. “You forget where you are and just be in the moment.”So, too, does the audience. Little happens in the film, dramatically speaking. Instead of exposition, conflict and rising action, its rhythms are those of lived domesticity. In a succession of medium-wide shots, which resemble surveillance footage and encourage us to view the Hösses less as characters than as human case studies, we see the family go about its daily business. Here they are gathered around the dinner table. Here they are lounging in the garden. At moments — or rather, for extended stretches — these vignettes sail close to the wind of sheer tedium, but there is method in the drabness. Rather than taking you out of yourself, as most movies do, “The Zone of Interest” provokes a disquieting self-awareness. As the minutes ticked by and little of note occurred, I found myself asking the unwholesome question: When are we going to see behind the wall?By staging acts of obscene cruelty — a pair of sociopaths breaking a man’s leg with a golf club as his son looks on, a married couple murdering their own daughter before themselves committing suicide — Haneke’s films seek to shock us into an awareness of our conditioned appetite for such spectacles. In “The Zone of Interest,” which Friedel described as a kind of spiritual sequel to “The White Ribbon,” Glazer uses different means to pursue a similar end: It’s by withholding violence that he shocks us into recognizing just how much it fascinates us. The effect, at least on me, was a shaming apprehension of complicity. As you watch the film, you slowly come to realize what Glazer is suggesting: that in its ways, the Höss house, where ordinary life goes unconscionably on, is as much a scene of horror as the camp itself. Unlike the abjection unfolding “over there,” this kind of contented obliviousness has rarely been portrayed onscreen. The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home. To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including — perhaps especially — when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.As “The Zone of Interest” receives its theatrical release, the mass murder of Jews is back in the headlines, and many seem indifferent, if not outright thrilled. Glazer was revulsed by Hamas’s killing spree in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which left a body count of roughly 1,200, according to Israeli authorities, including at least one Holocaust survivor; some 240 hostages were also taken. “It makes everything else seem so frivolous by comparison,” he said of the attack a few days later, from his home in central London. “I’ve lost interest in the film and everything surrounding it.”At the time, he was reluctant to say more, but when we corresponded in late November, he expressed his growing anger at the way that Israel was invoking the specter of the Holocaust to explain what happened and to justify its response. Now in its third month, Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza — “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has so far killed over 18,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local health officials. That assault, accompanied by exterminationist rhetoric — “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, while advocating for electricity, food, water and fuel to be cut off from Gaza — has itself drawn comparisons to earlier campaigns of mass violence. To identify as victims, in Rose’s words, “turns us into strangers to ourselves as moral agents and social actors.” A vacuum of self-knowledge is soon filled by the desire for violent revenge, especially if you’re convinced your enemies are “counterhuman,” in Levi’s term. By inviting us to consider our resemblance to the culprits, “The Zone of Interest” is an attempt to short-circuit these ingrained responses and to open up space for self-criticism and doubt. Though it’s unlikely to have the same effect on history as “Holocaust” and “Schindler’s List,” it might chip away at the crude binary thinking — the children of light versus the children of darkness, and so on — that those movies have instilled in our culture. “It isn’t a partisan film,” Glazer told me. “It’s about all of us.”Unlike “Schindler’s List,” which leaves us, Rose says, “piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel,” “The Zone of Interest” is short on consolation. Though Höss was convicted of war crimes in 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz later the same year, the film ends in early 1944, as he learns he’s being transferred back to the camp and reunited with his family, who had remained there. It is a moment of personal vindication. “I’m pleased as punch,” he tells Hedwig on a long-distance call. In his final months in charge, the deadliest in the camp’s existence, he oversaw the murder of nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews. The action was named Operation Höss in his honor.Before the film ends, though, we are finally shown behind the wall. In a disorienting sequence, Glazer cuts to present-day Auschwitz, where we see cleaning ladies at work in the former gas chambers and crematories. Here, at last, are the victims, or what remains of them: piles of shoes and suitcases displayed behind glass panels, a corridor hung with black-and-white mug shots. Is this a bravura instance of jazz filmmaking, an unexpected formal flourish designed to catch the audience off guard? Or is it something humbler than that, an admission of artistic defeat? Glazer has taken great pains to construct an airtight historical realism, but in the end he’s reduced to shooting photos of the dead, to showing us an image of an image. Perhaps, above all, this interpolated footage should be read as a warning. Be vigilant, it seems to say: The door of history can swing open any moment. During Glazer’s childhood, the Holocaust was rarely discussed. A few years ago, when he first mentioned to his father that he was making a film about Auschwitz, he was met with a blunt response. “What are you doing that for?” his father asked. “Let it rot.” “It’s not rotting,” Glazer replied. “It’s not even dead. Read the paper. It’s in the world.”Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was a profile of the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov. Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and a designer in Portugal. She is known for her retro-style collages. More

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      Michel Ciment, Eminent French Film Critic, Is Dead at 85

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      He helped define cinema as high art for generations of moviegoers and filmmakers in France and beyond, even if he irked some of them with his passion for Hollywood.Michel Ciment, a French film critic whose passion for cinema helped define it as serious art for generations of French moviegoers, directors and producers, even while irking some of them with his unabashed love of American film, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 85.His death was confirmed by the film magazine Positif, for which he had long served as editor in chief, and by the Cannes Film Festival, which called him “a free spirit with an insatiable curiosity” and “the embodiment of cinephilia.”Mr. Ciment (pronounced SEE-mah) derived his authority from just that: his unbounded love of movies and an encyclopedic knowledge of film that sprang from it. He was an adept of the uniquely French cult of movies as high art, and of the great director as genius. But that was counterbalanced by an embrace of “all types of cinema,” the Cannes festival said, a passion born in his childhood addiction to American westerns and gangster movies.Mr. Ciment was an unabashed Americanophile in a French cultural environment in which checking the anti-American box is often a prerequisite to being taken seriously. He was sometimes reproached for it, his son Gilles recalled; in later years he became a senior lecturer in American Civilization at the University of Paris.He communicated his enthusiasm for film, beginning with his first critical forays in the early 1960s, in a torrent of books, reviews, interviews and radio broadcasts. (His status in the world of film criticism was such that he was often interviewed by other critics.)Mr. Ciment celebrated the great directors of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in books on Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan and Francesco Rosi, each thick with probing interviews in which critic startles director with his detailed knowledge of their films.These directors trusted him and opened up to him because, he told the Toronto Film Review in 2020, “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”His son recalled: “They would say that an exchange with Michel Ciment was like nothing else. With him, he really knows your film, he remembers the characters’ names. And then he would put your film in relation to the history of cinema.”For his book “Kazan on Kazan” (1973), Mr. Ciment spent 10 days with the director and conducted 40 hours of interviews. That was typical of his methods. He favored those who believed, like him, that “all the arts are found in cinema,” as he put it to an interviewer this year with the radio channel France Culture. For him, the superior film combined visual, aural and literary greatness.A 2009 book by Mr. Ciment compiling interviews he conducted with many movie directors. They opened up to him, he said, because “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”Berg Publishers“All the great directors I hung out with — whether it was Losey, Kubrick, Kazan — they had a generalized culture,” Mr. Ciment said in the radio interview. “These were people who had read an enormous amount, who listened to music, who had seen lots of paintings.”He criticized contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, who, he said, work in a cruder idiom and have “encouraged the young toward an absence of culture.”The son of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who narrowly escaped being rounded up with other Jews in Paris by Nazi collaborators during World War II, Mr. Ciment traced his pro-American views to childhood memories of the liberation of France in 1944.“At 6, to see the Americans disembark, pitching cans of food, chewing gum — it’s thanks to them we regained our liberty,” he told France Culture.In contrast to the sometimes doctrinaire impulses of that other pole of French film criticism, the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut propagated theories of cinema that they went on to put into practice, Mr. Ciment’s instinct at Positif was free-form.“Always a bit anarchist, libertarian, we couldn’t have cared less about fashions,” he told the Toronto Film Review. “We said what we thought about films, what we loved about films, without preconceptions.”His serious approach to film is evident in his book about the politically oriented realist Italian director Francesco Rosi, who made films about the mafia, corruption, injustice and war. Implicit in the book is the idea that film is as worthy of close analysis as serious literature, a view Mr. Ciment gained from his early studies with two postwar French masters of literary and philosophical criticism, Paul Benichou and Gilles Deleuze.Mr. Ciment praised Mr. Rosi for “hunting down the lie, cornering it in its hide-out,” for a “close engagement with reality in which the smallest false step would have been a betrayal,” and for being “conscious of the impossibility of reaching the truth.”Even in this early book, Mr. Ciment’s attention to detail in film is evident: At one point, referring to Mr. Rosi’s antiwar film “Many Wars Ago” (1970), he asks the director why “the night battle sequence is predominantly blue in color.”Mr. Ciment, second from left, with fellow members of the jury for the 1978 International Film Festival in Cannes, France. The American director Alan J. Pakula is third from left, and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann is next to him. Jean Jacques Levy/Associated PressMichel Jean Ciment was born on May 26, 1938, in Paris to Alexander and Helene Cziment. His father “Frenchified” the name after the war, Gilles Ciment said. Michel’s father, who had immigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s, was a tailor for the great French fashion houses, and his wife worked with him.One morning in July 1942, the police came by the house to warn Helene that her husband had best not come home that evening: It was the eve of the great roundup of Paris Jews known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, named after the stadium where they were taken. Some 13,000 Jews were seized and subsequently sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.The elder Mr. Ciment escaped to Normandy and was hidden by peasants there for the duration of the war. His son followed him there, and his wife went back and forth from Paris.The family regrouped in Paris after the Liberation, and Michel Ciment went on to study at two prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Lycée Condorcet. It was as a student that he discovered, in the intense Paris film culture of the day, the great silent films of Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.He later studied at the Sorbonne and received a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1960s, allowing him to study at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “It was American education that completely confirmed me in my tastes,” Mr. Ciment told France Culture.He made his debut as a critic with a defense of Orson Welles in Positif in 1963. He later joined its staff and went on to become editor in chief.From the 1970s on he published a stream of books. Besides the ones on Kazan and Rosi, there were others on American cinema, Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos as well as “Passport to Hollywood,” a book of interviews with directors, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.In addition to his son, he is survived by his second wife, Evelyne Hazan-Ciment. His first wife, Jeannine Ciment, who worked with him at Positif, died in 1986.Mr. Ciment’s passion for film never flagged. As Jérôme Garcin, his colleague on the popular French public radio cultural review “Le Masque et La Plume,” said of him in the French magazine L’Obs, “At 85, he remained, when the lights went out and the magic lantern began to dispense onscreen its dream-colors, a child in wonderment.” More

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      ‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: A Hollow Holocaust

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      Jonathan Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.What is the point of “The Zone of Interest”? I’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s movie twice, and each time I’ve returned to this question, something that I rarely feel compelled to ask. Movies exist because someone needs or wants to make art, tell a story, drive home a point, defend a cause, expose a wrong or simply make money. All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.Written and directed by Glazer, the movie is loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis with the same title. Heavily researched — Amis lists numerous resources in the emotional afterward — the book is narrated by three men, including a fictionalized character based on Rudolf Höss, the S.S. commandant who for several years ran Auschwitz. There, he oversaw a factory of torture and death in which, per the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, an estimated 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered, the vast majority Jews.In adapting the novel, Glazer has jettisoned much of Amis’s novel, most of its characters, plotlines and inventive, at times near-hysteric, language and tone. What Glazer has retained is the novel’s intimate juxtaposition between the horrors of the extermination camp and the everyday lives of its non-inmate characters. Unlike Amis, however, who routinely invokes and at times describes the barbarism inside the camp — with its “daily berm of corpses,” as he writes — Glazer significantly and pointedly keeps these horrors at an oblique remove.Instead, Glazer focuses on the day-to-day routine of the camp’s commandant and his family, using their real names. Together with their five children and a smattering of servants, Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — played by the relatively undemonstrative Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — live in a nondescript, somewhat austere, predictably orderly multistory house. There’s a spacious garden with a small wading pool, beehives, a sprawling greenhouse and beds of flowers tended by camp prisoners. A tall wall topped with barbed wire borders the garden; through the wire, the tops of numerous death camp buildings dot the view.The proximity of their home and these buildings is a jolt, and based on fact. The real Höss family, like their fictional counterparts, lived in the Auschwitz complex, a swath some 15 square miles in size that housed different camps in an area called the Interessengebiet or “interest zone.” The house was tucked near a corner of the oldest camp, Auschwitz I, which had prisoner barracks, gallows, a gas chamber and crematory. After Höss was arrested in 1946, he wrote that “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.” The children ran free and his wife had “her flower paradise.” He was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, not far from where the family had lived.The time frame in Glazer’s adaptation is vague, though primarily seems to take place in 1943 before the real Höss was transferred to another camp. The movie opens on a black screen accompanied by some music, a foreboding overture that gives way to a pacific scene at a river with a group of people in bathing suits. Eventually, they dress and motor off. Much of the rest of the movie takes place at the Höss family home, where Glazer’s carefully framed, often fixed cameras record the children playing while the parents chat and sometimes argue. You see Rudolf going off to work in the camp while Hedwig oversees the house. At one point, you also watch a prisoner quietly spreading ash on the garden as a soil amendment.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer deploys a number of art-film conventions, including narrative ellipses and long uninterrupted takes. Throughout, characters are kept at a remove (as if they are being surveilled) and filmed mostly in medium or long shots; I only remember one grim close-up of a face. There are bursts of music (by Mica Levi), one bit features unnerving yelping and whooping, though not a conventional soundtrack. For the most part, the intricately layered audio foregrounds everyday conversations and chatter over a low, persistent machinelike hum, a droning that is regularly punctuated by train sounds, muffled gunfire and indecipherable yelling and screaming. It sounds like the engine of death.The overall effect of Glazer’s approach to this material is at first deeply unsettling, in large part because — as ordinary life ticks on — you worry that he will take you into the extermination rooms. Instead, he continues focusing on the Hösses’ everyday life without obvious editorializing (or outrage), swells of emotion-coaxing music or the usual mainstream cinematic prompts. The camerawork — save for a few traveling shots that underline the closeness of the house to the interior of the camp — is smooth and discreet. It’s demonstrably unshowy. It’s all very matter of fact, whether Hedwig is showing a visitor around the garden or Rudolph is with some suited executives discussing plans to expand the camp.In stressing the quotidian aspect and placid texture of the family’s life, Glazer emphasizes just how commonplace this world is, a mundanity that invokes what Hannah Arendt, in writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, famously called the “banality of evil.” Rudolf and Hedwig give the appearance of a conventional bourgeois married couple (however creepy). When he gets a promotion that requires them to move, she resists. Every so often, though, fissures crack the surface of this calm as when Hedwig tries on a fur coat that’s been confiscated from a prisoner; she shuts herself in a room first, which suggests that she’s hiding and, by extension, knows she’s doing something wrong.There are other disturbances, too, like the clouds of dark smoke and the screams that one of the children hears and which discomfort him. More dramatically, Glazer inserts several eerie black-and-white scenes of a girl or young woman placing apples around the camp at night, presumably for prisoners. (Later, you learn that she’s an outsider.) These interludes are radically distinct in look and tone from the rest of the movie: They were shot with a thermal imaging camera and are accompanied by violent music. They also show the only instances of kindness and resistance in the entire movie. Yet what is most striking about these sections isn’t the singularity of this woman’s actions but their stylistic bravura, their wow factor.“The Zone of Interest” is a blunt, obvious movie. In scene after scene, Glazer underscores the blandness of these characters’ lives without resorting to exegesis, weeping violins and faces or, instructively, a heroic figure like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who helped save hundreds of Jews and is the title character in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Spielberg’s film has been criticized for, among other things, focusing on a non-Jewish hero, a focus that speaks both to most filmmakers’ inability to honestly engage with the Holocaust — in its full, numbing, routinized barbarism — and to mainstream cinema’s compulsive desire for happy endings or at least some reassurances in the face of the abyss.Glazer peers into the abyss but wisely doesn’t attempt to “explain” the Holocaust. Notably Rudolf and Hedwig don’t spew Nazi ideology; they embody it, which is foundational to the movie’s conceit. Deeply self-interested, they enjoy their power. They are, the movie suggests, representative of the millions of ordinary Germans — and, yes, perhaps anyone, anywhere — who chatted over breakfast while their neighbors were slaughtered. As Hedwig reminds Rudolf in one scene, they have the life they’ve always dreamed of. They are villains, full stop. And like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer doesn’t simply tell a story; in his use of art-film conventions he provides a specific frame through which to watch it. This is clearly part of its attraction as is the breathing space his approach creates: it is scary, but not too.These conventions can create a sense of intellectual distance and serve as a critique, or that’s the idea. They also announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition. They signal that the film you’re watching is different from popular ones made for a mass audience. These conventions are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.Zone of InterestRated PG-13 for references to the mass death. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Ava DuVernay and Other Directors Rethink Holocaust Films

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      Tragic tellings of the Shoah are all too common. The directors of “The Zone of Interest,” “Origin” and “Occupied City” refuse to let it live in the past.In the British comedy “Extras,” Kate Winslet, who appears as a version of herself, is playing as a nun in a film about the Holocaust. When commended for using her platform to bring attention to the atrocities, she replies callously, “I’m not doing it for that. I mean, I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” She explains that she took the role because if you do a movie about the Holocaust, you’re “guaranteed an Oscar.”The fictional Winslet’s perspective on movies about the Holocaust, though obviously a joke in the context of that 2005 episode, has become something of a prevailing opinion. Since Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) won best picture and six other Academy Awards nearly 30 years ago, Holocaust films from “Life Is Beautiful” (1998) to “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) have been seen as Oscar bait. Well intentioned or not, they are considered the kind of cinema you should but don’t necessarily want to see, meant to tug at heartstrings and win their creators prizes.In fact, Winslet herself proved that theory correct when she won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for “The Reader,” in which she played a woman who served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. At the ceremony, the host, Hugh Jackman, built a musical moment around the fact that he hadn’t seen “The Reader,” a gag that got a roar of knowing laughter from the audience: Movies about the Holocaust are important, yes, but skippable.But maybe the notion of the Holocaust movie is changing. This year in particular, three films seek to challenge the idea of what it can and should be. All of them turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present, in that way making the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

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      “Émigré,” about Jews who fled Nazi Germany, debuts amid U.S.-China tensions and cultural rifts over the Israel-Hamas war. It comes to New York in February.“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.Musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra warming up before a dress rehearsal of “Émigré.” The oratorio will be performed by the New York Philharmonic in February.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for several years, a commission of the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Long Yu. But it is opening at a delicate time, with tensions high between China and the United States and with the Israel-Hamas war spurring heated debates in the cultural sphere.The war in the Middle East is a sensitive subject in China, which has sought to pitch itself as a neutral broker in the conflict, though state-controlled media has emphasized the harm suffered by civilians in Gaza while giving scant coverage to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” at China’s muted response to the Hamas attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for “Émigré” have rarely mentioned its plot, and listed its Chinese title, “Shanghai! Shanghai!” The major state-owned Chinese news outlets did not cover the premiere this month, although an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.The creators of “Émigré,” which takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the piece would help underscore a shared sense of humanity in a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that help that vision.”Brock Walsh, who wrote the lyrics to “Emigré,” with Mark Campbell.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe composer Aaron Zigman said, “Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy.”Qilai Shen for The New York TimesIn 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten, came up with the idea for the piece. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, about commissioning the work together.Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere in wartime but hoped that its message would still resonate.“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”To shape the music and the plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concerto.For “Émigré,” Zigman said he was eager to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles unfolding in Asia and Europe at the time. Those include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by occupying Japanese forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of antisemitic violence carried out by Nazis in 1938.“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.Rehearsing in Shanghai. Yu, the orchestra’s music director, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten.Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat headed for Shanghai.The brothers are anguished about leaving their parents and homeland but try to settle into life in China. Josef is interested in traditional Chinese medicine and visits an herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the daughter of the owner, who is grappling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union draws scorn from their families.Shanghai’s role as a haven for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them set up settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s, the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was issued visas to enter mainland China, including for arrival at Shanghai’s docks.When Japan seized east-central China in 1937, including the area around Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront docks. But the Japanese military did not start controlling visa access to the area until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.The result? Nobody was controlling who entered China at Shanghai. It became an open port for those four years: Foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the Western settlements.Mark Campbell, who wrote the libretto with Brock Walsh.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesCampbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped that the stories of refugees in “Émigré” could be a modern-day lesson.“It’s very important for the audience to go away and remember there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese required Jews in Shanghai to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. Its Central European-style townhouses and house-size synagogue still stand.But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed amid rapid growth in recent decades, causing concern among preservationists. Two gargantuan office buildings, each 50 stories tall, cast huge shadows toward the little synagogue at midday.At least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto during the war, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 secretly lived elsewhere in the city. (Almost all of Shanghai’s Jews left after the war, many resettling in the United States.)A building in what was the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The core block has been preserved amid encroaching urban growth.Jackson Lowen for The New York TimesShanghai was a deeply troubled place in the years that “Émigré” takes place: packed with Chinese refugees as well as Jewish ones, frequently short on food and potable water, and racked by epidemics of disease. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.Among the ghetto’s residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 at 13 and who much later became treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, a Japanese police station was just down the block from the synagogue. He and others had to apply at the station for permission to leave the ghetto during the war, and by the final year, it was almost impossible to obtain permission.Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just in the ghetto, to collect those who succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around the city, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was vastly overcrowded, it was dangerous, there was constant fighting among factions, and shootings.”“Émigré” received wide attention in China when it was announced in the summer. With a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, for a news conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum celebrating the commission.When the joint Shanghai-New York project was announced, “Émigré” was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” will have its American premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the Israel-Hamas war would lead to alterations in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year.“Things change quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and incorporate some visual elements, including images of devastation from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.Several New York Philharmonic musicians took part in the premiere in Shanghai, and a group of Chinese musicians will play at the premiere in New York.At a recent rehearsal for “Émigré” at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, which open the work. “Grant peace in high places,” they sang in Hebrew.“Sacred presence blossoming,” they sang in Chinese.The cast includes the tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister, Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.Between rehearsals, Zhang said that she was trying to stay focused on the music, and that she hoped “Émigré” could provide some relief from the war.“We’re going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music has to be separate from this.”Zhang added that she had found some comfort in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece, Josef sings:If I ruled the world,Mine to redesign,I’d stop every gunshot, every war.Now, forevermore.Li You More