THE LAST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
There is an audacious time leap in Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone Of Interest’ (2023) where I find a comparison to the art of Anselm Kiefer and, to a lesser degree, the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg who recreated (with actors) the testimonies (including mundane minutiae) of Nazi war criminals in his epic, rarely seen masterpiece, 'Hitler: A Film From Germany' (1977).
Mythogeography
The concept of memories of cultural and political history being compacted or buried over time is a key theme that the German artist returns to often in his work whether it be in painting form or as giant art sculptures/installations/excavations where it becomes abundantly clear to the observer that he believes there to be no such thing as an innocent landscape. .
“When Kiefer looks at one of his particular objects - an attic, a field, a winter landscape, railway tracks, a book - he sees all its layers, the mythical as well as the historical, the distant past as well as the years leading up to the Third Reich”. - Kevin Hart reviewing Celan/Kiefer's 'Myth, Mourning and Memory
"The Zone Of Interest" almost seems like an art installation work itself, where one might imagine touring in a museum that recreated the domestic scene at the Höss household situated just outside the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp during one of humanity's darkest chapters.
And it is a modern museum in which the time leap late in the movie cuts to in a moment of solitary reflection by Rudolf Höss who pauses in a ghostly corridor in Berlin, 1943, before descending down a shadowy staircase. We might almost imagine he'll eventually arrive at the seventh circle of hell to pay for his planning and architecture of violence throughout the film.
As one of the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust, does this uncertain and ambiguous moment reflect a premonition by Höss of his crimes being recorded by history? By cutting to the present-day Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum where the artefacts of genocide are kept in glass cabinets for the public to view while cleaners maintain the space, is Glazer possibly suggesting that the ultimate punishment is the final record of these crimes and those who commit them in the very same space where they were carried out? Does Höss sense this in his lonely premonition standing by the stairwell? A moment later, Höss dry wretches at the bottom of a flight of stairs recalling Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Art Of Killing' (2012) where one of the Indonesian death squad leaders from the 1960s, Anwar finds his aging body breaking down as he finally processes the crimes of genocide he's committed. No matter how many lies he's told himself to justify why he did what he did, his body finally rebels against him causing him visible physical distress in front of camera.
The film also brought to mind Alexander Sokurov's 'Russian Ark' (2003) where centuries of history lurk like ghosts in the shadowy rooms of the Russian State Armitage Museum, playing out scenes from the past with no awareness of the present or the future to come. Only the viewer has any sense of how to organise the preceding timelines in this contemporary cinematic 'zone of interest'.
Perhaps this eerie moment on the stairwell in Glazer's film is an extension of Höss's zone, a satanic twin to Tarkovsky's zone from his film 'Stalker', where the 'living' and 'conscious' landscape is fully aware of all that pass through it and is the witness (like God) to the actions and thoughts perpetrated within it.
If there is a sense that Höss has this level of self awareness of his crimes being recorded by history in this strange, unsettling moment, then you might say he is being momentarily buried alive by his fleeting guilty conscience.
On the other hand, this could all be projection by the director and by us, the audience.
Such is the power of film, for like dreams and history itself, we cannot know for certain.