'The Zone of Interest': Nominated Best Pic, Best Dir., Oscars, Review- Hedwig, Brigitte Hoess, NoVa

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Last edited Tue Mar 12, 2024, 06:54 PM - Edit history (2)

Scenes, Uncomfortable Reflections, 2:48 mins
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'The Zone of Interest Review-Jonathan Glazer’s unforgettable Auschwitz drama is a brutal masterpiece,' The Guardian, Feb.4. 24. -Ed.

Only the constant pall of smoke, and a dread-inducing soundscape, tell of the horrors beyond the wall as the idyllic life of the commandant of the death camp and his family rolls by in Glazer’s Oscar- nominated film. There are some films- many of them- that impress on a first viewing but which start to trickle away. There are others, far fewer in number, that strike like a lightning bolt on a first watch and stay with you, scarring themselves into your psyche. Jonathan Glazer’s masterful and chilling The Zone of Interest fell into the second group for me.

The film has secured an Oscar nomination in the best screenplay category, along with 4 others, including best picture and best director.

It is very much its own brooding, boldly unconventional entity, sharing with Martin Amis’s book a title and a location - Auschwitz, or more specifically just outside the walls of the camp, in the home of a high-ranking Nazi and his family - but little else. (Photo: Hedy chortles as she cherrypicks the choicest possessions of murdered Jewish prisoners). The walls are a crucial component of this film, which shows the daily details of the life of an upwardly mobile Nazi couple - the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) - and their 5 children.

The Höss family are raised according to the tenets of the Artaman League, a German anti-urban, back-to-the-land movement that advocated an agrarian ideal and respect for the natural world (Rudolf, a man who presides over the murders of thousands of people each week, dictates an aggrieved memo about the lack of respect for his prized lilacs). They enjoy wholesome, halcyon picnics by the river captured in dispassionate mid and wide shots and idyllic days in the lush, lovingly tended garden of the Höss villa, a source of considerable pride for Hedwig.

We never see beyond the walls that separate her cherished roses and dahlias from the industrial death factory on the other side. But through Johnnie Burn’s incredible, immersive sound design, the ambient noise generated by the horrors within the camp is evoked with a suffocating intensity that matches the choking pall of smoke billowing continuously from the Auschwitz furnace chimneys. (Photo: Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss trying on the fur coat of a murdered Jewish captive)...
- More, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/feb/04/the-zone-of-interest-jonathan-glazer-brutal-auschwitz-drama-sandra-huller-christian-friedel-martin-amis

- Wiki, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Hoess; German; 25 Nov. 1901- 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer and from May 1940 until Nov. 1943 & again May 1944 until Jan. 1945 the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, he was convicted in Poland and executed for war crimes committed on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and for his role in the Holocaust.
He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution.
On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers, where more than a million people were killed. Höss was hanged in 1947...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss

- 'The daughter of Auschwitz’s commandant.
For 40 years, Brigitte Höss has kept a secret from her friends and neighbors in Northern Virginia.' The Week, Jan. 8, 2015.
https://theweek.com/articles/459800/daughter-auschwitzs-commandant

Hedwig Hoess, ignorant? wife of Rudolf Hoess.