The Static Shot in ‘The Zone of Interest’

What would André Bazin say? The man who did more than anyone else to invent modern film criticism erected the sign ‘montage interdit’ in front of the cinema, and ever since we have watched films in the light of our acceptance or rejection of that motto, and its subsidiary admonitions about depth of field, production artifice, etc. Our young (but quickly aging) millennium has seen the growing domination of film festivals by a style that seems at first glance like the culmination of everything Bazin hoped films could be. The camera is locked off, the subject is in the middle distance, everything is in focus, and whole scenes occur within the single shot. The style has a long prehistory (from Warhol and Snow to Hou and Tsai) but its popularity in recent decades probably owes more to Apichatpong Weerasethakul than anyone else, to the extent that the Brazilian critic Bruno Andrade has diagnosed a phenomenon of ‘Apichatpongism’. Apichatpong developed his style in search of an ever-greater perceptual integrity, playing the quietude and languor of his characters against teeming, artificially augmented soundscapes of his native Isan. These were very particular motivations and they came out of an idiosyncratic practice in a singular place. Yet Apichatpong and a few other filmmakers reaching critical prominence around the turn of the millennium found themselves lumped into an academic category called ‘slow cinema’, which obfuscated the very different lineages, approaches and results of the filmmakers it homogenised; No Quarto da Vanda has little in common with Blissfully Yours. This category was nevertheless powerful (or simple) enough to work back on production, and perhaps most importantly it promised a way around the problems of fiction, of the stale smell that was thought to cling to anything belonging even obliquely to classical mise en scène. The last twenty years have seen a steady stream of films dominated by the long take and the long shot. In the weakest examples, distance and stasis have proved a useful ersatz for materialism and ‘objectivity’.

More than a decade before the first murmurings of ‘slow cinema’, Tag Gallagher already had the number of a certain reading of Bazinian ‘ontology’, the one that culminates in the dogma of academic slow cinema:

Bazin writes as though the ultimate movie would be an etching of unmediated reality, whereas any manipulation detracts from this goal, and thus long takes and long shots are ideally preferable to anything shorter or closer. But art is touching, and we do not need movies to see the world.

We do not need movies to see the world, but the desire to make movies that allow people to believe that they are seeing the world, and especially those parts of the world that it is difficult or painful to look at, has only grown as cinema has aged. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is the latest attempt to find an answer to the famous ban attributed to Adorno, ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’. The stakes of attempting to show the camps on film received their most important critical treatment in an article from 1961 by Jacques Rivette entitled ‘On Abjection’, which is in turn discussed, movingly and intelligently, by Serge Daney, in his autobiographical essay ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’. Reviewing a film by Gillo Pontecorvo, Rivette zeroed in on one shot:

A phrase of Moullet’s has been constantly cited, left and right, and usually foolishly enough: morality is a matter of tracking shots (or Godard’s version: tracking shots are a matter of morality); people have wanted to see in it the height of formalism, so they could criticize its “terrorist” excess (to reprise the Paulhanian terminology). Look, however, in Kapo, at the shot where Riva kills herself by throwing herself on an electric barbed-wire fence; the man who decides, at that moment, to have dolly-in to reframe the corpse in low angle, taking care precisely to record the raised hand in the angle of the final frame, this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.

As Daney explains in his essay, these two sentences have cast a long shadow, providing not only a shorthand for the dismissal of a whole host of failed depictions but the cornerstone of an entire cinematic morality. They cannot avoid also raising the spectre of a depiction that would not be based on such manoeuvring, that would ‘take care’ in the right ways. How to make a movie about the camps that refuses the means movies use to induce the desired identifications? The Zone of Interest is, according to Forbes magazine, ‘the antithesis of a traditional Holocaust drama’ (cf. their recent articles ‘South Africa’s Case Against Israel Is Hamas’s Lawfare Victory’ and ‘Lessons Of Managing A Business In A War Zone’). But even one’s silence makes a phrase, as Jean-François Lyotard reminded us, and the alternative to the manipulations of conventional film rhetoric is not a refusal of rhetoric but the proposal of a different rhetoric, with its own forms of manipulation. Jean-Luc Godard made fifty years’ worth of films based on this fact, but hardly anyone saw them and many who did have been only too pleased to forget about them. Despite what has been written in some places, Glazer does not generally use very long shots, but he does use every other element of the currently ascendant rhetoric of the art film — distance, disidentification, naturalistic lighting, and bans on the closeup and on almost all camera movement (the most the camera moves is for sober trucking shots). Glazer’s proposition is that this rhetoric, which comes to him readymade, as it were, happens to have (at last!) furnished the appropriate means of depicting the camps. The presentism and conformism of this gesture should perhaps already arouse suspicion, but it’s necessary to start with particulars.

On the side of production, Glazer’s approach was to install unmanned cameras around his set, creating what he has likened to ‘Big Brother in the Nazi house’. He thereby liberated himself from the director’s responsibility to stand behind his equipment. But unmanned cameras, which are an extremely familiar part of the world for almost everyone who has seen or will see Glazer’s film, capture their images in a particular way for a particular kind of spectator, whether that spectator is a policeman, a small business owner or a television viewer. Nothing in The Zone of Interest suggests that Glazer has reckoned with the implications of this; for all his apparent formalism, he has operated under the assumption that the socially corrosive apparatus shared by pre-fascist surveillance and pre-fascist reality television can be imported into his project, making the viewer isomorphic to that apparatus’s spectators, without contaminating the ethical condition of the end result, because of what will be represented in front of those cameras. In other words, he believes (at best) that content will redeem form, that product will redeem economy. This alone may not make Glazer a hack, but it does mean he has at least one thing in common with every hack who has made the kind of Holocaust film Glazer intends both to eschew and to render obsolete.

This is why it is so dispiriting to read Glazer remark that he wanted the film to appear ‘un-authored’. Here is the ultimate fantasy that issues from the conversion of a sentence in Adorno into a dictum and that dictum’s slow evolution from interdiction into ambiguous aesthetic challenge; here also is the point at which the dream of writing without a face and the injunction of ‘embodied’ ethical response meet and promise their impossible reconciliation. At long last, to ‘bear witness’ to Auschwitz without depicting it. It’s indulgent, but more importantly it’s mistaken, because responsibility and authorship, meaning the act of authoring something, overlap most unavoidably where it is no longer a question of avowing the idiosyncratic shape of one’s strokes but rather the fact that one is involved with the machine that cut down the tree to fashion the brush. Here, at some length, is J. H. Prynne:

The very medium of poetic textuality incorporates and instantiates the features of breakage at local and microscopic levels, as discoverable by phonological and other types of analysis, into a dialectic which may look arbitrary or merely optional but which polarizes the task of poetic composition. Formal and structural features within the language system, the selective-discourse system, the prosodic and formal verse system, all within the contrastive perspectives of historical development, compete to provoke the formation of shifting hybrids across boundaries of sometimes radical counter-tension. The active poetic text is thus characteristically in dispute with its own ways and means, contrary implication running inwards to its roots and outwards to its surface proliferations: not as acrobatic display but as working the work that, when fit for purpose, poetry needs to do. These are the proper arguments of poetry as a non-trivial pursuit, the templates for ethical seriousness. As just one example, the condoned spillage of innocent blood is everywhere around us, now, and the artificers of consolatory blessing who are the leaders of organized religion are up to their dainty necks in this blood. I have believed throughout my writing career that no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.

To be ‘in dispute with’ one’s ‘own ways and means’ is the very opposite of schematizing those ways and means, swapping them out, and reopening for business. That swapping out, which precedes and determines the film, takes the place of what might have happened within the film, and more specifically what the film might have done with and to itself had it not relied so absolutely on its own dispositive. When it comes to authorship, it is as Racine’s Phèdre says: ‘mon mal vient de plus loin’. The enunciative or even merely phatic functions that operate within a film (‘this is a film, and here are its signifiers’) are not optional and have dirtied one’s hands long before they get to drawing blueprints, but this is the only way worthwhile work gets done. Clean hands inevitably turn into jazz hands as a formal struggle eschewed turns into a victory celebrated. It is this danger that Glazer should have had at the heart of his considerations. Instead, the question of representation is assumed to be something that can only exist outside of the film; once the device that responds to it has been selected, the question has ceased to be relevant. This is formalism at its worst, as close as you can get to a precise aesthetic definition of reification.

Let’s recall that Adorno never wrote the words ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’. He wrote: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’ The second sentence is important: the fact of the barbarism is corrosive even to the knowledge of poetry’s impossibility. In other words, we forget even why we cannot write poetry. Before his ink was dry, Adorno could already see his words being turned into an element of the catechism by which the Culture Industry would learn to ward off the spectre of the camps. Later, apparently having been convinced he had in fact said ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’, Adorno wrote:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream; that is why it may have been wrong to say that no more poems could be written after Auschwitz. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question of whether it is still possible to live after Auschwitz, whether those who escaped by chance and should rightly have been killed are allowed to do so. To live on requires coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which Auschwitz would not have been possible: this is the drastic guilt of the spared.

The postwar art that Adorno most championed — Beckett, above all — traversed this coldness. Look what has become of bourgeois subjectivity in Play. In The Zone of Interest, by contrast, nothing is traversed, all is inert, left as it was found, as the device demands. It casts a tautologically, exotically cold gaze on coldness. Much has been written about the film’s ‘restraint’. According to The Jewish Chronicle, ‘[i]t is the restraint that stands out in Jonathan Glazer’s multi-Oscar nominated Holocaust film’ (cf., inter alia, that paper’s recent articles: ‘Urging Israel to “use restraint” is to deny Gazans their only escape from hell’, ‘Israel must be free to finish the eradication of Hamas’, ‘Feminist activists must stand with Israel’, and ‘Preserving historical integrity: a call to avoid politicising the Holocaust’). The Atlantic calls the film ‘an eerie and restrained study of the Holocaust’ (cf., inter alia: ‘The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False’, ‘I Don’t See a Better Way Out’, ‘Let the Activists Have Their Loathsome Rallies’, and ‘Why a Gaza Cease-Fire Is Unrealistic’). But restraint is the luxury of the comfortable, and turning away from the coup de grâce is the behaviour of a Roman Emperor. It is not at all clear that this is a more morally sound position than looking, perhaps especially when (as in the Colosseum) averting the gaze is made into a pose. It is therefore more accurate to say that The Zone of Interest includes a certain aesthetic of restraint as the central element of its rhetoric, based on a very particular, historically circumscribed and contestable understanding of what restraint in cinema constitutes. According to that paradigm, Renoir’s This Land is Mine and Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, produced in the heat of the Second World War by men whose home countries were being governed by Nazis, would not be restrained films, because they partake of classical mise en scène. But one only has to shift one’s position very slightly from the one the film attempts to impose (and depends on imposing) to perceive how, for example, a montage of flowers soundtracked by the screams of camp inmates, which eventually fades to a red screen, is nothing like restraint. It would be disappointing to think one hundred and thirty years of cinema had not left us with a more sophisticated idea of restraint than just not moving the camera. Equally, it would be obtuse to ignore the fact that the rhetoric of the twenty-first century art film offers the aesthetic of restraint that allows The Zone of Interest to work on its viewers. It does this by enjoying itself.

It has to be acknowledged, whether one wants to attack or defend it, that the film really does luxuriate in its device, believing itself indemnified by the distinction between on-screen action and off-screen sound. From start to finish, everything relies on the power this Manichaean and anti-dialectical split, not examined but erected and left in place, is supposed to possess. Glazer’s anti-spectacle bows down even more obediently to cinema’s cult of the visual since, by the fiat of its own organizing fiction, it proclaims the visual to be the only place where transgression is possible. But everyone knows, whether they want to admit it or not, that to create such a fictional structure of transgression and act as if it is an ethical law is always to incite enjoyment. Lacan: ‘We don’t ever transgress. Sneaking around is not transgressing. Seeing a door half-open is not the same as going through it. There is no transgression here, but rather an irruption, a falling into the field, of something not unlike jouissance — a surplus.’ The game is given away when we glimpse, through tall grass, a line of prisoners being marched through a field, in a shot that is revoked as soon as it is offered; this turns the ethics of representation into a burlesque show, and just as theatrical (jazz hands, again). If the film ever went beyond demonstration, it could not enjoy itself like this because it would have to face the consequences of recognising that this Law, this Other, does not exist. Then it would have to navigate the really thorny ground. As it is, the viewer makes it through the film with the Other intact, as the guarantor for his paltry enjoyment. We could contrast this with a film like Pasolini’s Salò — a film Rivette, incidentally, deeply admired — which recognises that the non-existence of the Other, the impossibility of transgression, means that the representation of fascism has to depend on filming the guilty from a position of radical, idiotic innocence — beating the bêtise of the Other at its own game, if you like, rather than trying to outsmart it. Pasolini had the wherewithal to realize that this is the only way not to be obscene. Glazer, like all moralists, flirts with obscenity.

Living as we do in nations that bathe us daily in the blood of innocents, in which we find ourselves complicit in six international atrocities before breakfast, we have a tendency to assuage our consciences through acts of conspicuous sanctimony. One thing art ought to do is discourage us from this; one thing it often does is facilitate it. It is difficult for me to believe that anyone aware of history emerges from The Zone of Interest genuinely edified; at the same time it’s very easy for me to believe that the film allows not being edified to feel like an achievement. At bottom, I do not see how The Zone of Interest moves us one inch closer to understanding what it takes for people, including children, to live in total indifference of mass slaughter on their doorstep — what it took in 1943 and what it takes today. But this doesn’t matter. The film is unimpeachable because its entire project is to find a way around the question by mortgaging itself to pure demonstration. It takes, and so offers, refuge.

Films exist that do not shirk this challenge: Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges by Harun Farocki, Nicht versöhnt by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Ici et Ailleurs by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Talaeen a Junuub by Jayce Salloum and Walid Raad, to name some examples. These filmmakers did not engrave their works as though on tablets of stone. The problem of representation persists and there is no refuge in the image, only the meagre courage to look. Years of reflection on the tracking shot in Kapo, years of watching and worrying about films, and a visit to Cambodia, led Daney, whose father died in the camps, to this conclusion: ‘Learning how to “read” the visual and “decode” messages would be useless if there wasn’t still the minimal, but deep-seated conviction that seeing is superior to not seeing, and that what isn’t seen “in time” will never really be seen.’ It is no coincidence that it is impossible to imagine anyone reconciled to the genocide that is currently taking place in Palestine reconciling themselves to the films I have listed. We owe it to ourselves not to ignore the fact that at least some of these same people have found it very easy to reconcile themselves to The Zone of Interest. That alone would not be proof of its failure; if films were guilty by association, we would have to do away with Stagecoach and Cattle Queen of Montana. All the same, it may not be difficult to understand why this film has gone down so easily with those who prefer not to see but could never accept the idea that they may be ignorant. But films are touching, and we do not need art to see the world. A film could be made of us all watching The Zone of Interest in the UK, the USA, France, Germany, soundtracked by IDF gunfire and the screams of Palestinians — but this wouldn’t necessarily be any more worthwhile. We would only end up having to make a film of us watching that film, and so on to infinity.

ADDENDUM 30/7/2024. It’s certainly been a strange experience to see the vehemence with which people respond to the idea, expressed early in this essay, that the positioning and operation of the cinematic apparatus produces ideological effects on the position of the spectator and the construction of their imaginary identification(s); and that cinematic techniques are not plucked from an eternal Platonic heaven but carry with them the historical and ideological scars of their previous uses. I have more or less been accused of inventing out of whole cloth what this essay’s original readership (more or less a coterie; this is the Medium blog of someone with a very small ‘following’ that was even smaller when I posted this) knew full well is called ‘apparatus theory’, and whose foundational texts are now more than fifty years old. Not only this, but these ideas, which helped give birth to the entire field of film theory, are now beyond the pale for a good number of viewers of ‘arthouse’ cinema, even those who have probably learned to deplore the vulgarity of the dismissal of ‘French theory’ in other fields. The blame for this situation lies in an unhappy division of intellectual labour and a dereliction of duty on the part of academics and critics alike — but that’s another story. For the benefit of this essay’s new readers and anyone fresh to the field, I include a reading list of some of the most important texts from the period 69–72 (that have been translated into English), plus a couple of key pieces from outside that period, at the bottom of this page. It will be noted that my own claims are extremely modest and straightforward in comparison to those pursued in these articles.

I also noticed that I was met with incompatible responses in pretty much equal number. That Glazer knows full well he is putting his viewers in a position analogous to his fascists and is indeed out to do this from the start, and that the idea that his formal choices put the viewer in a position analogous to a fascist, a reality TV viewer (the comparison Glazer himself offered), a business owner, or anyone else, is patently absurd; that Glazer has constructed the perfect distance between viewer and subject to allow (self-implicating, if properly exercised) judgment, and that he has abolished the (comforting) distance between the viewer and the fascists that disgust them; that Glazer’s technique provides the cold objectivity required to see his subjects for what they are, and that he is challenging the supposed objectivity of the recording medium. Representatives of these positions seemed to see their points as very obvious and, more interestingly still, seemed to see themselves as being on the same ‘side’ of the argument. The hairshirt comes in designs to suit all tastes, I suppose. I don’t remember another case of a director being supplied with so many contradictory justifications for their choices, as required, and I’m sure the rest of them wish they could be so fortunate.

Two more small points: I will cite OED definition 3 of ‘isomorphic’: ‘Of the same or an analogous form’; and refer those confused about the term ‘pre-fascist’ to Alain Badiou’s ‘The Fascism of the Potato’.

Cinematic apparatus and ideology: key texts

Baudry, Jean, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970), trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, №2 (Winter, 1974–1975), 39–47.

Bonitzer, Pascal, “Off-screen Space” (1971), trans. Lindley Hanlon, in Cahiers du cinéma, 1969–1972: The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–305

Cahiers du cinéma, “Cinema, Ideology, Politics (for Poretta-Terme)” (1971), in Cahiers du cinéma, 1969–1972, 287–290

Comolli, Jean-Luc, “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field” (1971–2), in Cinema Against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited, trans. and ed. Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 141–244

Daney, Serge, “Cinemeteorology” (1982), trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum, available at https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/09/cinemeteorology-serge-daney-on-too-early-too-late/

Daney, Serge and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Work, Reading, Pleasure” (1970), trans. Diana Matias, in Cahiers du cinéma, 1969–1972, 115–136

Oudart, Jean-Pierre, “Cinema and Suture,” (1969) trans. Kari Hanet, in Cahiers du cinéma, 1969–1972, 45–57

Pleynet, Marcelin and Jean Thibaudeau (interview), (1970) “Economic-Ideological-Formal,” trans. Elias Noujaim, in Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1978), 149–164

Rivette, Jacques, “On Abjection,” (1961) trans. David Phelps, available at http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/abjection.html