Of Interest
This is an impromptu post after watching Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar winning The Zone of Interest.
There is too much to talk about. The bureaucracy of horror, for one. I had rewatched Infinity Pool beforehand. It should be noted Brandon Cronenberg - following Antiviral and Possessor, the latter of which remains among my favourite films of the last ten years - is interested in such bureaucracy. As if the audience can feel the exasperated sigh, Oh, god. The paperwork.
In addition, The Zone… feels indebted to silent cinema which, as many readers will be aware, was never actually silent with its soundtracks and, I’d argue, title cards. Rather, silent cinema can be defined through its visual language, which The Zone… responds to with the vectors of a swastika.
It makes my heart happy that Glazer has been getting recognition. His debut, Sexy Beast, is a film I rewatch and rewatch. Under the Skin is among the best mainstream experimental cinema. But what I really want is to refer to my previous post. If Bern Porter is the unsung anti-patron of Oppenheimer, then Heimrad Bäcker holds the same title for The Zone…
In Seen of the Crime, crucial reading for folk interested in contemporary poetics, Derek Beaulieu introduces Bäcker:
Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003) renounced his former membership of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party after World War II. He spent the remainder of his life as a poet, editor and intellectual as a means of confronting his own involvement in how the Nazis used language itself as a means of propagating the Holocaust. Bäcker was a member of the Hitler Youth’s Press and Photography Office before he worked as editor of the Austrian avant-garde press Neue Texte. His Hitler Youth employment exposed him to the anaesthetized prose of the Nazi’s intricate documentation of their Final Solution
Seen of the Crime is free to download here. The aforementioned essay begins page 47.
Through found language and visual representation, Bäcker addresses unspeakable horror through the infrastructure that enacted it. This is a literary analogue to The Zone…
I commend Jonathan Glazer and Bäcker to you not as entertainment or solace. There can be no response to what happened in the concentration camps. Such media brings us closer to not being able to have a response. This is not a good thing. There can be no good thing. But it is the only thing that might allow us to grieve which, given the gravity of the horror, can and should only ever lead to more grieving.