Sound waves placidly disturbing.

Black

Distorted voices

Birds chirping while music looms restlessly.

Idyllic landscape in the style of Manet's Le déjeuner sur l’herbe; a riverside picnic.

Picking berries, bathing.

At dusk, returning home, the lights are turned off.

Separate beds: Rudolf and Hedwig are a married couple with numerous offspring, living in a bourgeois house, with a garden, a magnificent greenhouse, and a pool with a slide.

All normal if it were not for the fact that Hedwig is the wife of Rudolf Höss, commander of the Auschwitz camp, whose house borders directly on the wall separating the garden from the concentration camp, conveniently close to his workplace, keeping everything under control and especially receiving clothes, jewelry, makeup, furs, diamonds hidden in toothpaste, because the Jews are very ingenious!

Birthday party, Rudolf receives a beautiful canoe, one of the sons wears a uniform with a swastika.

Meetings upon meetings to determine which engineering skill will optimize the realization of the camp's goal; a counterclockwise process seems to best match the routine of the gas chambers.

Meanwhile, the children at home play with the gold teeth taken from the Jews, while the father smokes a cigar and turns off, obsessively every night, all the lights and locks all the doors.

In the bedroom, the wife asks him when he will take her again to the Italian Spa, and he replies that he likes the new French perfume she is wearing.

She, nicknamed by her husband the queen of Auschwitz, proudly walks around the garden; her mother has come to visit her and shows her the flowers, the organic garden, and the honey produced from that "paradise" all designed by her.

When her husband tells her about the transfer, she does not want to leave that place, a vital space she calls it, and the life they enjoy is worth the sacrifice of being away.

Red, deafening music.

The ring-shaped crematorium seems to be the solution and it is necessary to deposit the project; meanwhile, Rudolf talks on the phone and a girl enters and begins to undress: after all, his wife is far away.

Fairy tales, dreams, imagination... resistance.

Screams, groans, promotions, production goals, wages, and awards; someone worries that Rudolf will not smoke everyone out, workers are still needed!

Sumptuous parties with ice in the shape of a swastika, luxury, music, charity concerts.

The museum, the stairs, the darkness.

Total darkness, music, sound waves of screams and dissonant noise.

Loosely based on the eponymous 2014 novel by Martin Amis, shot entirely in Poland, the film proposes a Shoah that has become unrepresentable, either by excess of representation or because the contemporary way to continue to commemorate it is to circle around the event by imagining everything without showing anything.

It is evident that the film takes it for granted that everything is already known and that one has seen, read, studied a lot about it: the extreme modesty of the images thus makes it relentlessly shameless.

If Auschwitz has become a sort of tourist, commercial circuit, often crowded and vaguely irreverent, how can one still underline the horror and cruelty of extermination?

In fact, nothing is seen, something is heard, screams, groans; many objects, clothes, jewelry are seen and there is always someone ready to clean Rudolf's boots as soon as he enters the house.

There is smoke coming out around and the contemporaneity of the message lies precisely in the deafening absence of the image of the bodies when everything else is inevitably and violently inconceivable.

It does not want to be memory but a portrait of a present, absent, blind, absorbed, cowardly, innocent yet guilty, of a testimony invisible to eyes turned elsewhere.

Glazer, only in the monochrome pauses smeared with deafening music, manages to direct the gaze towards the invisible: perhaps only where nothing is seen is it again possible to have a new look?

Only a negative dialectic of Adornian memory, disturbing and not conciliatory, delivers a punch to moral agnosticism.

Only where it is not possible to affirm does the possibility of negation cancel itself out.

Music, especially dissonant, because "it is intrinsically utopian, as it is not compromised with the image," Ernst Bloch maintained.

Here there is no compromise with the commercial image of violence, no possible compromise.

If that was the normality of horror now we must dwell on the horror of normality: the wall perhaps is no more, there is no demarcation, the boundary, the line that divides evil from worse.

It was said that after Auschwitz, the philosophical-theological categories used until then were no longer valid.

If today the Shoah has become unspeakable, how can it be told? And if after Auschwitz every form of art seems to be only an expression of barbarism, how can one attempt to make art after and about Auschwitz? Finally, how can artists address such a theme, since direct witnesses are soon to be missing? as Wlodek Goldkorn argues.

Difficult to make an extermination an object of representation without commercializing the horror according to the profit dynamics typical of our system.

If Glazer has intended to act otherwise, succeeding moreover, his cannot but be a film/metaphor of our world where everything that is visible goes unnoticed: perhaps his work follows a conceptual project, if the gaze is domesticated we give back to the invisible its ontological significance.

The modesty of the non-images here shows that the presence of the invisible is more incisive than the visible abomination.

It seems also easy to think that Glazer's wall is the boundary that demarcates the area of pain from that of indifference, plausible instead that that wall is now invisible in front of the death industry, the logic of production and domination, the totalitarianism of the cultural industry now become technique.

A film that demarcates an unbounded area of interest whatever the way of looking at it, however weakened by the domestication of the pathological voyeuristic enjoyment of the contemporary gaze: the descent into darkness seems inevitable.

After all:

23-Oct-2023 by Fabian