There is nothing to do. to'holocaust In cinema, there is an objective well running dry. Maybe the British director Jonathan Glazer (Subcutaneous birth) with Area of ​​interest He collected the last possible drops. The result is not entirely irresistible. After the extreme tension that is unambiguous in the documentation night and fog, Spielberg's sober and astonishing mastery with Schindler's List And a radically partial immersion in horror Son of Saulwith Area of ​​interest The Holocaust can only be seen through a prolonged, sinister voice-over off-screen, without being seen at all.

They are the faint screams of the deportees, the bursts of machine gun fire, and the snarling barks of dogs, coming from behind the wall and barbed wire. Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The listening point, which becomes like the viewing point, is the anonymous and immaculate house with a spacious garden, vegetable patch, greenhouse and swimming pool, of the camp commandant, SS Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Holler) and children, some friends, and Jewish prisoners who work as gardeners and waiters. The house is literally attached to the walls of a concentration camp in what was defined in Nazi bureaucratic terminology as an area of ​​interest (com.interestingbeit): an area inhabited by SS officers, soldiers and camp staff, which grew up around the first barracks where the deportees were killed and which between 1941 and 1942 became a concentration camp with gas chambers and large smokestacks.

The camera sterilely records the daily life of the Hoss family, trips to the river and on horseback, birthdays, games, and lunches. Until Hoss is apparently taken away and his wife Hedwig becomes angry and opposes him because he wants to stay there to raise their children. Essentially, Glazer builds the film with a false crescendo, meaning that nothing happens in the narrative other than a few minor ripples that are not supported by any psychological investigation of the characters; While the effect of the sinister sound builds up unconsciously in those watching and those acting on stage towards a finality and semi-finality that haunt each other between a Scorti-style digestive metaphor hitting the stakes and a symbolic parallel in today's Auschwitz that is usually ambiguous and counterproductive to the point of big.

It is here, precisely, in this supposed double iciness of the director's point of view – the cold medium shots and long shots rather than the warm close-ups of the field and the reverse shot – and in the anthropological nature of the heroes – The so-called “banality of evil” to which we return – which – which Area of ​​interest It has major stretch marks of formal cohesion. If the expressive task of the horror model “art film” in the manner of David Bordwell was rigidly constructed and had an extreme meaning only through the distance of the spot taken from the immoral subjects and from that annoying, insistent sound (the film) The New York Times “He wrote brutally.”Glazer makes the Holocaust sound like background noise“) There would be no need for a whole series of grossly urgent, preachy inconsistencies passed along when necessary: ​​the deportee's lipstick left in the pocket of Mrs. Hedwig's fur coat; Hoss counting the notes of the various currencies taken from the prisoners; Hoss washing his penis after having sex. Sex with a Jewish waitress; the violent washing of children with boiling water after their father pulled them out of the river where the remains of gassed Jews were floating; a clear familiarity with the language and practice of extermination.

All the details of moral judgment that Glazer adds with ordinary excitement (read: how mean Hoss is) take away the power from the “background noise” because Hoss and company have been programmed not to hear that sound. And also because we must begin to explain the blindness and insensitivity of Hitler's willing executioners, not according to the sole Arendtian perspective of the banality of evil, but above all based on the blind obedience to authority (whatever it may be) that was revealed after long experiments in the laboratory. By a social psychologist Stanley Milgram In the early 1960s, also after it followed Eichmann trial.

A paradigm shift that would better explain why the Hauss and the majority of Germans, or any unsung hero of other genocides in history and time, did not hear the background noise of the deaths of others; This would also explain how all those devices used in the tradition of Glazer's art film (the long black and red screens, at the beginning, middle, and end of the film) were precipitated by the 1970s, which even Antonioni; The black-and-white sequences clash with nocturnal thermal monitors) and collide with that invisible on-screen death that is now, more or less willingly, largely trivial.