Jonathan Glazer
La Zona d'Interesse

The concept of the Zone is immensely fascinating.

"Zona is the dark room of our repressed desire" Geoff Dyer

The Zone was brought to cinema by Tarkovskij in Stalker, the journey toward the deepest and most unconfessable desire, yet filled with fear, illusion, reticence, unanswered questions, unresolvable torments of the soul and of Faith.

The Zone is a defined place within which to seek or establish one's ideal existence, the living space that Germany sought to reclaim in the East after the loss of the Empire's territories following the First World War.

In art, and cinema in particular, everything has somehow already been said, making it impossible to create something truly new, and any attempt can only lead to a relative and partial originality.

Cinema, after all, has always drawn from literature, as well as from other arts (especially painting), in addition to itself.

With this premise, The Zone of Interest, based on the eponymous novel by Martin Amis - one of the greatest contemporary authors, who passed away last year -, stands among the most interesting and unique within the context of films dedicated to the darkest period of the 20th century, namely the Holocaust. Because this offers a boundary perspective, just beyond the gates and fences of Auschwitz, as if the line separating the inside from the outside were a clear demarcation zone between Evil and the precise, regular, and orderly life of Tradition. The perfect ideal of the National Socialist vision, embodied, for example, by the Goebbels family and, as the film presents, the Höss family.

The family, customs, life outside urban corruption, the ideal of the "warrior farmer," a diligent agricultural colonist adhering to orders and hierarchy, a radical anti-modernism: these are the ideological elements that characterized the National Socialist experience, which fascinated the German people, creating an almost religious sentiment toward the regime; beyond the ruthless and systematic anti-Semitic and general racism.

These aspects are not disconnected, but were part of the entire Nazi ideological structure and are all fundamental for understanding the German psychology of the time. Therefore, there was, in reality, no zone of demarcation. It was only apparent.

The zone, like the border, is a fragile human creation. Every metaphysical aspect must ultimately be set aside.

The greatest quality of this new film by Jonathan Glazer, more than ten years after the release of Under the Skin, is precisely the extreme accuracy with which the psychology and private life of the Nazi official during the Hitlerian regime is described.

The banality of Evil has been studied by Hannah Arendt and The Zone of Interest is perhaps the film that most illustrates this concept through image representation.
It is no coincidence that Eichmann is mentioned on a couple of occasions, whose trial inspired Arendt's reflections.

There are many ways to represent horror, and films, books, and documentaries about the Holocaust are in the hundreds. In The Zone of Interest, the genocide is off-screen and thus even more disturbing, because the normality with which it is discussed and executed reminds us of how it was a technical and bureaucratic matter like any other. A part of the routine, an aspect of normality.

Even the greatest horrors had their structures to keep clean and efficient, and especially their officials, sometimes dressed in white, for they were inwardly convinced of their own purity. Indeed, they were loving with their children and wives and loved their dogs, cats, and horses.

In Himmler, the Decent One by Vanessa Lapa, a documentary film that used letters and footage of the Reich's Führer, creator of the SS and organizer of concentration camps, this deep, paradoxical conviction of acting every day for the good already emerged, even from the worst of all Nazi criminals.

The Zone of Interest is a film that fascinates and does not offer a trivial experience. From the first minutes, entirely tinted in black, like the Genesis preceding the dawn of man in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Darkness that will also close the film at the end of its circular, orderly, clean, and idyllic family life and extermination planning parable.