François Margolin is a director, producer and screenwriter. He directed the film
Salafists
(2016).
To discover
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“Travelling is a matter of morality”
.
This famous sentence from Jacques Rivette - written about the film
Kapo
by Gillo Pontecorvo, at the beginning of the 1960s in Cahiers du Cinéma - then taken up by Jean-Luc Godard, is the definitive sentence with which any film which seeks to show the Nazi extermination camps.
Basically, this means that it is shameful to make aestheticism about Auschwitz.
Now, what is director Jonathan Glazer doing in his latest film,
The Zone of Interest
, Jury Prize winner at the last Cannes Film Festival?
Aesthetics.
And that’s what’s shocking.
Especially since he claims, throughout his interviews, to be Claude Lanzmann, an absolute authority on the subject, who shared, of course, Jacques Rivette's point of view.
And who did not hesitate to unscrupulously demolish Steven Spielberg's
Schindler's List
.
I don't know what Claude Lanzmann, who died almost six years ago, would have thought, but, having been his friend and his producer in his last years, I allow myself to say that Jonathan Glazer's film appeals to me. was terribly shocking.
Jonathan Glazer chooses not to show Auschwitz, its barracks and its gas chambers.
On the contrary, relying on the eponymous novel by the Englishman Martin Amis - from which he diverts most of the plot - he places himself on the side of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi leader of the camp.
He makes us live alongside him and his family.
It shows - a priori laudable intention - that one can live for years alongside the fumes of the gas chambers a completely normal life as a German petty bourgeois.
In the film, the Jewish deportees make two or three timid, mute appearances, and we can guess the horror they suffered.
Over there, on the other side of the wall which borders the garden of the Höss pavilion, this garden where the children of the Nazi dignitary play.
Near the swimming pool where the little family is snorting.
A tracking shot of an Auschwitz barracks is always immoral, even if we only see a good third of it.
François Margolin
The problem is that we gradually get into the head of Rudolf Höss, and that we share his vision and his feelings.
One wonders why.
Why share with him the problems he is experiencing with his wife?
Why sympathize with his problems of promotion in the Nazi hierarchy?
Why suffer this discomfort for an hour and forty-five minutes?
Is it an artistic experience?
Video art?
A happening, as the Russian director Ilia Andreïevitch Khrjanovski did a few years ago at the Théâtre du Châtelet with his project
Dau
.
Because Jonathan Glazer is very proud of his aesthetic arguments.
He thus claims to have had ten cameras running constantly in the small pavilion.
One wonders why.
From the start of the film, he plunges us into five minutes of complete darkness to
“put us in the mood”
.
Then, right in the middle, in two minutes of absolute red.
Finally, and repeatedly, he shows us a little girl, in black and white negative, picking potatoes.
It’s very beautiful, very
“aesthetic”
.
But, once again, what is the meaning?
And speaking of tracking shots, Jonathan Glazer does not hesitate to use it, three or four times.
Certainly, with the argument that we follow characters from the Nazi family, and not Jewish deportees, but he films them in front of the wall which separates them from the barracks where they die of hunger or disease.
And we can see, in the upper third of the image, the top of these walls.
A tracking shot of an Auschwitz barracks is always immoral, even if we only see a good third of it.
Even if we have the pretext of partly hiding them by a wall.
Finally, the film ends - too bad if I
"spoil"
- with Polish cleaning women cleaning, today, the Auschwitz museum which replaced part of the camp.
Once again, what is the meaning of all this?
There is obviously an element of gogo catch, for
“bobos”
who are too happy to have a subject of discussion at their next dinner, where they will be able to quote the only sentence they know from the work of Hannah Arendt :
“The banality of evil”.
François Margolin
There is certainly one, because the film is a very big success in terms of admissions, in France at least, and it wins prizes all over the world.
Which is very surprising because the film is rather austere, not to say boring.
What part of the unconscious of its spectators does it touch?
Probably not the clearest or healthiest.
There is obviously an element of gogo catch, for
“bobos”
who are too happy to have a subject of discussion at their next dinner, where they will be able to quote the only sentence they know from the work of Hannah Arendt ;
“The banality of evil”
, this cream pie released today in all sauces.
And completely out of place here since we know that Rudolf Höss was a Nazi from the start (he joined the party in 1922).
But there might be worse.
I don't know if I dare say it, let alone write it, because it's obviously just a hypothesis.
But, throughout the projection, I couldn't help but think that this division of the world into two camps, separated by a wall, reminded me of another.
More recent.
The one that separates Israel from Gaza.
This has been evident since the massacres of October 7.
There is undoubtedly something obscene in imagining it, but perhaps it is the real reason for the success of this difficult film.
Perhaps this is what is most shameful for many spectators, like this dazzling return of current anti-Semitism.
This anti-Semitism which was camouflaged behind
“never again”
and compassion for the Shoah.
Since some have always preferred dead Jews to living Jews.
I would never allow myself to say that Claude Lanzmann would not have liked this film, or that he would have condemned it.
It would be pretentious to speak for him.
What I am sure of, however, is that there is not the slightest aestheticism in his masterpiece,
Shoah
.
Which is not the case in
The Area of Interest
by Jonathan Glazer.
And that is the problem.