This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/14/laszlo-nemes-i-didnt-want-son-of-saul-to-tell-the-story-of-survival
The article has changed 4 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 2 | Version 3 |
|---|---|
| László Nemes: ‘I didn’t want Son of Saul to tell the story of survival’ | László Nemes: ‘I didn’t want Son of Saul to tell the story of survival’ |
| (4 months later) | |
| Immersive is a word normally associated with thrillride films such as Gravity or Lord of the Rings, or boutique costumed events such as Secret Cinema; it is not one that tends to be linked with cinematic descriptions of human misery at its most extreme. But that is how Hungarian film-maker László Nemes likes to refer to his Oscar-winning Holocaust picture Son of Saul, which penetrates to the heart of the grotesque killing machine of Auschwitz. | Immersive is a word normally associated with thrillride films such as Gravity or Lord of the Rings, or boutique costumed events such as Secret Cinema; it is not one that tends to be linked with cinematic descriptions of human misery at its most extreme. But that is how Hungarian film-maker László Nemes likes to refer to his Oscar-winning Holocaust picture Son of Saul, which penetrates to the heart of the grotesque killing machine of Auschwitz. |
| Nemes, 39, says he wanted Son of Saul, his first full-length feature film, to be a visceral experience and that he had “spent years experimenting with immersive strategies”; really, what he is talking about is Son of Saul’s extraordinary ability to evoke both the baleful dread inside the concentration camp, and the frenetic chaos of its extermination process. For virtually the entire film, the camera is rammed hard into the face of its protagonist Saul Ausländer (the surname, pointedly, means “alien” in German), with unspeakable cruelties largely enacted in blurred, out-of-focus sections of the frame, or just off-screen. The restricted perspective, Nemes says, was designed to reflect the fragmentary experience of the prisoners themselves. “The human experience within the camp was based on limitation and lack of information. No one could know or see that much. So how do you convey that?” | Nemes, 39, says he wanted Son of Saul, his first full-length feature film, to be a visceral experience and that he had “spent years experimenting with immersive strategies”; really, what he is talking about is Son of Saul’s extraordinary ability to evoke both the baleful dread inside the concentration camp, and the frenetic chaos of its extermination process. For virtually the entire film, the camera is rammed hard into the face of its protagonist Saul Ausländer (the surname, pointedly, means “alien” in German), with unspeakable cruelties largely enacted in blurred, out-of-focus sections of the frame, or just off-screen. The restricted perspective, Nemes says, was designed to reflect the fragmentary experience of the prisoners themselves. “The human experience within the camp was based on limitation and lack of information. No one could know or see that much. So how do you convey that?” |
| Right from the first frames, Nemes’s techniques pay jolting, heartstopping dividends. A continuous three-and-a-half-minute handheld shot begins with indistinct figures running in panic, then moves with Ausländer as he helps to control a trainload of new arrivals for one of the notorious rail-platform “selections”. There is little obvious violence on display: just glimpses of the desperate, cowed deportees and the vicious bellowing soldiers; a confused babel of shrill whistling, blaring music and barking dogs. Through all this, Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) exhibits an eerie, beatific placidity, as if attempting to transmit some sort of calmness to the panicked crowds around him. | Right from the first frames, Nemes’s techniques pay jolting, heartstopping dividends. A continuous three-and-a-half-minute handheld shot begins with indistinct figures running in panic, then moves with Ausländer as he helps to control a trainload of new arrivals for one of the notorious rail-platform “selections”. There is little obvious violence on display: just glimpses of the desperate, cowed deportees and the vicious bellowing soldiers; a confused babel of shrill whistling, blaring music and barking dogs. Through all this, Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) exhibits an eerie, beatific placidity, as if attempting to transmit some sort of calmness to the panicked crowds around him. |
| If it isn’t immediately apparent, it becomes clear quickly enough that Ausländer is a figure apart: one of the Sonderkommando, the special squads of death camp inmates forced to assist in the extermination process by cleaning gas chambers, disposing of corpses, shepherding prisoners and the like. Every few weeks, they themselves were executed, and new Sonderkommando teams were formed. | If it isn’t immediately apparent, it becomes clear quickly enough that Ausländer is a figure apart: one of the Sonderkommando, the special squads of death camp inmates forced to assist in the extermination process by cleaning gas chambers, disposing of corpses, shepherding prisoners and the like. Every few weeks, they themselves were executed, and new Sonderkommando teams were formed. |
| Nemes says the surviving testimonies – some found after the war, buried in the death camp yards – prompted him to make the film. “The special squad was isolated from the rest of the camp: they were better fed and clothed, but had the certainty of liquidation at the end, because they knew everything about the extermination process. The notes they made, transmitted to us, gave me the sense of being there, the here and now, that I never experienced anywhere else. I thought, these people are like shadows between the living and the dead, caught between the victims and the perpetrators, but were also victims themselves. Their deaths were stretched over a period of several months.” | Nemes says the surviving testimonies – some found after the war, buried in the death camp yards – prompted him to make the film. “The special squad was isolated from the rest of the camp: they were better fed and clothed, but had the certainty of liquidation at the end, because they knew everything about the extermination process. The notes they made, transmitted to us, gave me the sense of being there, the here and now, that I never experienced anywhere else. I thought, these people are like shadows between the living and the dead, caught between the victims and the perpetrators, but were also victims themselves. Their deaths were stretched over a period of several months.” |
| Nemes is by no means first to take on the subject of the Sonderkommando: their appalling moral quandary was analysed by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved; he termed it The Grey Zone in the book’s second chapter – which was also the title of an American film based on the testimony of an Auschwitz doctor called Miklós Nyiszli. Claude Lanzmann interviewed a Treblinka Sonderkommando, Abraham Bomba, at considerable length in his epic documentary Shoah. Even Martin Amis included a Sonderkommando principal character in his recent novel The Zone of Interest. | Nemes is by no means first to take on the subject of the Sonderkommando: their appalling moral quandary was analysed by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved; he termed it The Grey Zone in the book’s second chapter – which was also the title of an American film based on the testimony of an Auschwitz doctor called Miklós Nyiszli. Claude Lanzmann interviewed a Treblinka Sonderkommando, Abraham Bomba, at considerable length in his epic documentary Shoah. Even Martin Amis included a Sonderkommando principal character in his recent novel The Zone of Interest. |
| But Nemes’s film has allowed audiences to enter the consciousness of the Sonderkommando like nothing else. “You have to approach it as a documentary,” Nemes says, and returns to his idea of the fragmented experience of camp inmates to account for Son of Saul’s wrenching effect. “Classical storytelling in the camp doesn’t make sense,” he says. More mainstream Holocaust films – your Sophie’s Choices, your Schindler’s Lists – “project emotions on to a story that just didn’t have them. For example, we think everyone was crying, but people were stunned, in shock, in trauma; the wake-up arrived later.” | But Nemes’s film has allowed audiences to enter the consciousness of the Sonderkommando like nothing else. “You have to approach it as a documentary,” Nemes says, and returns to his idea of the fragmented experience of camp inmates to account for Son of Saul’s wrenching effect. “Classical storytelling in the camp doesn’t make sense,” he says. More mainstream Holocaust films – your Sophie’s Choices, your Schindler’s Lists – “project emotions on to a story that just didn’t have them. For example, we think everyone was crying, but people were stunned, in shock, in trauma; the wake-up arrived later.” |
| Born in Budapest, and Jewish on his mother’s side, Nemes says he was marked by growing up in 1980s Hungary – “I was called a dirty Jew in class, for years and years” – before moving to Paris at the age of 12. He has an ambivalent relationship with his birth country: Hungary, he says “was extremely active in sending its Jews to the death camps” – but on the other hand, at the Oscars he thanked the Hungarian national film fund for backing his film. Still, his view of how history has developed over the past century remains bleak: “The 20th century just brought, with modern weaponry, the worst degradation of the individual, unseen since the middle ages. It’s interesting to see how the promise of good also contains the promise of evil.” | Born in Budapest, and Jewish on his mother’s side, Nemes says he was marked by growing up in 1980s Hungary – “I was called a dirty Jew in class, for years and years” – before moving to Paris at the age of 12. He has an ambivalent relationship with his birth country: Hungary, he says “was extremely active in sending its Jews to the death camps” – but on the other hand, at the Oscars he thanked the Hungarian national film fund for backing his film. Still, his view of how history has developed over the past century remains bleak: “The 20th century just brought, with modern weaponry, the worst degradation of the individual, unseen since the middle ages. It’s interesting to see how the promise of good also contains the promise of evil.” |
| Son of Saul emerged at Cannes just under a year ago, and its electrifying impact was immediately apparent. It won the second-place grand jury prize (runner up to Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan) and took many more on the international film festival circuit, culminating in the best foreign film Oscar this February. It has been an extraordinary outcome – Nemes describes it as “a moving train; we are going pretty fast” – of which one of the most intriguing aspects is Nemes himself: a slight, callow figure, looking much younger than his age. | Son of Saul emerged at Cannes just under a year ago, and its electrifying impact was immediately apparent. It won the second-place grand jury prize (runner up to Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan) and took many more on the international film festival circuit, culminating in the best foreign film Oscar this February. It has been an extraordinary outcome – Nemes describes it as “a moving train; we are going pretty fast” – of which one of the most intriguing aspects is Nemes himself: a slight, callow figure, looking much younger than his age. |
| You might be tempted to think Nemes’s fearless approach to Auschwitz – a subject that has intimidated and defeated almost every mainstream film-maker who has tried to take it on – is the iconoclasm of a younger generation for whom survivor guilt and bearing witness is no longer a frontline concern. But Nemes doesn’t see it like that. “There are no survivors in my film; I have only the dead. I didn’t want it to tell the story of survival. All these older films establish a safe road for the viewer, and at the end, some kind of liberation. But that’s not the story of the Holocaust. That’s the story of how we want the Holocaust to be. It’s not the story I wanted to tell.” He admits, however, that the film’s vision is not one of total nihilism: “There is a hope there, I think: not the hope of survival, but the hope of the inner voice that might still exist, when everything, including God and religion and sanity, is gone.” | You might be tempted to think Nemes’s fearless approach to Auschwitz – a subject that has intimidated and defeated almost every mainstream film-maker who has tried to take it on – is the iconoclasm of a younger generation for whom survivor guilt and bearing witness is no longer a frontline concern. But Nemes doesn’t see it like that. “There are no survivors in my film; I have only the dead. I didn’t want it to tell the story of survival. All these older films establish a safe road for the viewer, and at the end, some kind of liberation. But that’s not the story of the Holocaust. That’s the story of how we want the Holocaust to be. It’s not the story I wanted to tell.” He admits, however, that the film’s vision is not one of total nihilism: “There is a hope there, I think: not the hope of survival, but the hope of the inner voice that might still exist, when everything, including God and religion and sanity, is gone.” |
| Nemes suggests that his film has had a hard time with certain audiences – Germany, apparently, didn’t rush to sign it up for distribution, and as yet no Middle East country outside Israel has plans for a release (“It would be an interesting experience, but nobody has wanted to organise that yet”). With last year’s Holocaust-themed Oscar winner Ida triggering questionable responses, and Jews currently sensing a palpable rise in ethnic hostility even in the relatively liberal UK, these things matter. | Nemes suggests that his film has had a hard time with certain audiences – Germany, apparently, didn’t rush to sign it up for distribution, and as yet no Middle East country outside Israel has plans for a release (“It would be an interesting experience, but nobody has wanted to organise that yet”). With last year’s Holocaust-themed Oscar winner Ida triggering questionable responses, and Jews currently sensing a palpable rise in ethnic hostility even in the relatively liberal UK, these things matter. |
| Nemes, characteristically, is not one to sit on the fence. “Jews feel they are not being understood when they try to communicate their suffering after the second world war and their extermination. Voices must try to be heard about that experience – because if you don’t understand the destruction of the Jews and the European tradition, you don’t understand the suicide of modern Europe. If you don’t understand what it meant for Europe to kill the Jews, you don’t understand the evil at work within European civilisation. It’s still looming.” | Nemes, characteristically, is not one to sit on the fence. “Jews feel they are not being understood when they try to communicate their suffering after the second world war and their extermination. Voices must try to be heard about that experience – because if you don’t understand the destruction of the Jews and the European tradition, you don’t understand the suicide of modern Europe. If you don’t understand what it meant for Europe to kill the Jews, you don’t understand the evil at work within European civilisation. It’s still looming.” |
| • Son of Saul is released in the UK on 29 April. | • Son of Saul is released in the UK on 29 April. |