The Zone of Interest: new Holocaust film powerfully lays bare the mechanisms of genocide

30 January 2024 2024 年 1 月 30 日

Warning: this article contains spoilers.
警告：本文含有剧透。

The Zone of Interest opens by introducing viewers to a husband, wife and their family as they picnic by a river. The scene seems idyllic. Shortly after, the family drives home. Everything seems normal – but on closer inspection, their number plate is adorned with the insignia of the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi regime.
兴趣区首先向观众介绍一对在河边野餐的丈夫、妻子及其家人。场面看起来十分田园诗般。不久之后，一家人开车回家。一切看起来都很正常，但仔细一看，他们的车牌上装饰着纳粹政权精英卫队党卫军的徽章。

This scene encapsulates why The Zone of Interest is so unsettling. It depicts the everyday life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their family – yet, industrialised, genocidal violence moves along, continuously, in the background and periphery.
这个场景概括了为什么感兴趣区如此令人不安。它描绘了奥斯威辛集中营指挥官鲁道夫·霍斯（克里斯蒂安·弗里德尔饰）、他的妻子海德薇（桑德拉·惠勒饰）和他们的家人的日常生活——然而，工业化的种族灭绝暴力在背景和外围持续不断地发生。

Through meticulous camera setup and editing, writer and director Jonathan Glazer’s film depicts scene after scene of the daily routine of Rudolf, Hedwig and their children. Just as the viewer is becoming immersed in these scenes – perhaps even disturbingly aligning themselves with these characters – the film jarringly cuts away.
通过细致的摄像机设置和剪辑，编剧兼导演乔纳森·格雷泽的影片描绘了鲁道夫、海德薇和他们的孩子们的日常生活的一幕又一幕。正当观众沉浸在这些场景中时——甚至可能令人不安地将自己与这些角色联系起来——影片突然被剪掉了。

It cuts to abstracted, pure, bright red or white frames, to Mica Levi’s gut-wrenching, cacophonous soundtrack, or scenes disruptively shot with night vision cameras.
它会切入抽象、纯粹、亮红色或白色的画面，切入米卡·莱维令人心痛、刺耳的配乐，或者用夜视摄像机破坏性地拍摄的场景。

Creating the Höss home
创建 Höss 之家

Production designer, Chris Oddy, and his team built the Höss house and planted the garden from scratch. The set was constructed on location in Poland, directly next to Auschwitz, using detailed, historical records and photographs.
制作设计师 Chris Oddy 和他的团队从头开始建造了 Höss 房屋并种植了花园。该布景是在波兰奥斯维辛附近的地点建造的，使用了详细的历史记录和照片。

While domestic scenes of Höss and his family are routine, Johnnie Burn’s sound design is abrasive and incessant.
虽然霍斯和他的家人的家庭场景很常见，但约翰尼·伯恩的声音设计却是粗暴且持续不断的。

A continuous, low-pitched, industrial humming sound plays throughout. Its source is not shown, but it could be the sound of the crematoria. As the family go about their daily lives, there are distant screams, shouting, dogs barking and gunshots. The Höss family don’t seem to register them, apparently desensitised.
整个过程中播放着连续的、低音调的工业嗡嗡声。声音的来源没有显示，但可能是火葬场的声音。当一家人过着日常生活时，远处传来尖叫声、叫喊声、狗叫声和枪声。霍斯一家似乎没有登记它们，显然已经麻木了。

The film is formally rigorous. It makes use of the hidden cameras Glazer previously deployed in docu-fiction, Under the Skin (2013). With director of photography Łukasz Żal, Glazer positioned ten fixed cameras and 20 microphones around the Höss house.
这部电影在形式上是严谨的。它利用了格雷泽之前在纪录片《皮囊之下》（Under the Skin，2013）中使用的隐藏摄像机。格雷泽与摄影指导 Łukasz Żal 一起，在 Höss 住宅周围放置了 10 个固定摄像机和 20 个麦克风。

Żal has described how he and Glazer endeavored to use exclusively natural lighting, to avoid aestheticising the unthinkable.
扎尔描述了他和格雷泽如何努力仅使用自然光，以避免美化不可想象的事物。

The problem with making films about the Holocaust
制作有关大屠杀的电影的问题

The problem with making films about the Holocaust is that formal decisions inevitably also become ethical ones. The choices filmmakers make about camera movements, angles, lighting and editing have as much ethical significance as what is in front of the camera.
制作有关大屠杀的电影的问题在于，正式决定也不可避免地成为道德决定。电影制片人对镜头移动、角度、灯光和剪辑的选择与镜头前的场景一样具有伦理意义。

Audiences are familiar with (perhaps anaesthetised to) the typical iconography of the Holocaust in film, such as watchtowers, barbed wire and smoke. In her comprehensive study of Holocaust film, Indelible Shadows (1983), historian Annette Insdorf describes these images as a kind of figurative shorthand: “the visual part representing the unimaginable whole”.
观众熟悉（或许已被麻醉）电影中大屠杀的典型图像，如瞭望塔、铁丝网和烟雾。历史学家安妮特·因斯多夫（Annette Insdorf）在对大屠杀电影《不可磨灭的阴影》（1983）的综合研究中将这些图像描述为一种比喻的速记：“视觉部分代表了难以想象的整体”。

In The Zone of Interest, these recognisable images are disturbingly estranged. For example, from the perspective of the garden, a watchtower is visible in the background, partially obscured by pristine white sheets hanging on a washing line.
在《兴趣区》中，这些可识别的图像令人不安地疏远了。例如，从花园的角度来看，背景中可以看到一座瞭望塔，部分被挂在晾衣绳上的原始白色床单遮盖。

Instead of showing the operation of the crematoria as a closeup, the pulsating orange-red light from their chimneys illuminates Hedwig’s mother’s bedroom, disturbing her sleep. Children play in a pool in Hedwig’s cherished garden, atop of which is a shower, symbolically associated with the extermination of innocents in the camp.
火葬场的运作并没有以特写镜头的方式呈现，烟囱发出的脉动橙红色灯光照亮了海德薇母亲的卧室，扰乱了她的睡眠。孩子们在海德薇珍爱的花园里的一个游泳池里玩耍，池顶有一个淋浴，象征着营地中无辜者的灭绝。

Representing gas chambers on film
在胶片上代表毒气室

Mainstream cinema relies on narratives of conflict and resolution, and so tends towards a binary notion of “good” and “evil”. The Zone of Interest, however, in Friedel’s disquieting, cold portayal of Höss, shows that genocide is perpetrated not by “evil”, but by administrators – concerned with numbers, timetables and blueprints.
主流电影依赖于冲突和解决的叙事，因此倾向于“善”和“恶”的二元概念。然而，弗里德尔对霍斯的令人不安、冷酷的描绘中的“兴趣区”表明，种族灭绝不是由“邪恶”实施的，而是由关注数字、时间表和蓝图的管理者实施的。

Höss is shown meeting with several men in suits, matter-of-factly explaining detailed plans for more efficient gas chambers immediately after a scene where Hedwig gossips with her friends. Such a contrast underlines that the ordinariness of perpetration.
影片中，霍斯与几名西装革履的男子会面，在海德薇与朋友闲聊的场景结束后，霍斯立即实事求是地解释了更高效的毒气室的详细计划。这种对比凸显了犯罪行为的平凡性。

Critics have praised or condemned films about the Holocaust such as Son of Saul (2015), Schindler’s List (1994) or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) for the techniques they use to represent gas chambers. Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah (1985), once said that if direct footage of the act of genocide in the gas chamber were to exist, he would destroy it. Watching it would transgress the most profound moral taboo.
评论家们对《索尔之子》（2015 年）、《辛德勒的名单》（1994 年）或《穿条纹睡衣的男孩》（2008 年）等有关大屠杀的电影赞扬或谴责，因为它们使用了表现毒气室的技巧。 《浩劫》（Shoah，1985）的导演克劳德·兰兹曼（Claude Lanzmann）曾表示，如果毒气室中种族灭绝行为的直接录像存在，他会销毁它。观看它会触犯最深刻的道德禁忌。

One of the starkest moments in The Zone of Interest is its representation of the gas chambers. Rudolf Höss is leaving a party for the Nazi leadership in Berlin. He looks at something off screen, down a dark corridor. The film cuts to a close-up of a small, white circle, surrounded by blackness – the spy hole on the door of a gas chamber.
《感兴趣区》中最严峻的时刻之一是它对毒气室的表现。鲁道夫·霍斯将离开柏林的纳粹领导层。他看着屏幕外的某个东西，沿着黑暗的走廊。影片切换到一个白色小圆圈的特写镜头，周围是黑暗——毒气室门上的间谍孔。

This is followed by a disorienting jump to the present day. Cleaners dust the piles of victims’ suitcases, shoes and other personal belongings in the Auschwitz Memorial Museum.
接下来是令人迷失方向的跳跃到今天。清洁工正在清理奥斯威辛纪念博物馆里成堆的受害者手提箱、鞋子和其他个人物品。

Glazer was stunned to discover that one of the walls of the Höss family garden directly bordered the extermination camp. He has said that the concept of his film “became about that wall”.

Glazer’s film underscores how walls, borders or geographic distance “compartmentalise”, in producer James Wilson’s words, the suffering of others. Such visual barriers become the mechanism through which genocide has been – and continues to be – enabled.

The Zone of Interest is unsettling because of how it portrays perpetration of the Holocaust as normal, therefore leaving the viewer with the disquieting notion that anyone, in the right conditions, can be responsible for unspeakable things.

This article first appeared in 'The Conversation' on 30 January 2024.

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