#the zone of interest

[picspammer]

[saulgurdman]

My Poster for The Zone of Interest

[jackoshadows]

The annual list of World's happiest countries have been listed and Israel is number 8....

A genocide being carried out next door and these people are some of the happiest people in the whole world...

Finland

Denmark

Iceland

​Sweden

​Netherlands

Costa Rica

Norway

​Israel

​Luxembourg

​Mexico

This is why the movie 'The Zone of Interest' is still relevant today and why the movie's director Jonathan Glazer talked about Palestine and Gaza while accepting his Oscar and why Hollywood, including the likes of Marc Platt, then wanted to boycott him. They knew he was right.

Imagine being able to carry out perfectly normal, happy lives while entire generations, hospitals, homes and schools are being bombed and wiped out next door. The banality of evil.

[lazzerot]

My Mickey 17 hot takes

(aka I come to realize my experience is about the curse of knowledge and the bliss of ignorance and that I should find a different hobby than reading and thinking about fascism and anarcho-capitalism (like reading the Che Guevara diary my friend borrowed me and thinking about communism and normal anarchism instead))

Content note: minor scene spoilers but not the ending for Mickey 17 below the cut, featuring somewhat graphic discussion of practices in the Auschwitz concentration camps, the Holocaust/Shoah overall and the Katyn massacre later on in the post because I compare watching Mickey 17 with my experience watching The Zone of Interest and watching Katyń

It seems like everyone here on tumblr, one of the friends I went to see Mickey 17 with and all the people who write reviews for it online are convinced that Kenneth Marshall is supposed to be a stand in for Trump and while that may be one way to read the movie it's a pretty boring one and in my opinion part of the reason why it's getting so many mixed to bad reviews which it doesn't fully deserve.

Yeah the pacing of the movie is pretty awful at times, especially the exposition drags on and on. Yeah, the humor doesn't really land; at least for me it's neither dark nor absurd enough to actually be that funny, but maybe that's also due to the fact that it genuinely scared me for the first third of the movie; because none of this seemed like fiction to me. A lot of these ideas aren't futuristic metaphors anymore, they're being planned in reality right now. You just have to stop thinking of Marshall as Trump and start seeing Marshall as a mix of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the plot becomes terrifying.

This movie is specifically about wealth and power; about how capitalism supports fascism, not about Trump or the attempted assassination on him.

And since Musk just retweeted another Holocaust denial post this weird connection that my brain has made between Mickey 17 and The Zone of Interest/Katyń seems somewhat relevant, but more about that later.

I'm pretty sure the hand sign they're doing at the start (in my memory after Mickey signed the contract, but I might be misremembering, but then definitely later when they're on the shuttle that brings them to the planet and are discussing the no sex rule and the white supremacy birth stuff) is supposed to be a stand in for the white power sign, but it also just happens to be the wolf salute, which admittedly is niche knowledge you probably only have if you're like me and spend a lot of your time keeping up with right-wing extremism or Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists like Attila Hildmann and which definitely wasn't intended as such by Bong Joon Ho.

There's so many other examples that are reminiscent of the things billionaires do or are planning to do that perfectly fit into white supremacy and Nazi ideology that I wanted to discuss here but I've been thinking about this and writing this post for four days now and at this point I don't trust my memory with this anymore. I had a whole point about the sauces representing the objects Nazis created out of the human remains of the prisoners and not necessarily imperialist oil claims (though the movie definitely also is about imperialism) like someone on tvtropes.org wrote, about how water and thus liquids in general are luxury goods, but I'm not too confident about that now that my memory of the movie is deteriorating. So I'm not gonna continue this here, I just want to be able to publish this post so I can finally stop thinking about it for just a second.

If you want to read an actual good complete analysis just read someone else's or check out the tvtropes.org entry, idk.

What initially compelled me to write this post was that this whole experience reminded me of when I was watching The Zone of Interest with a friend: I sat in horror looking at the opening shot because I instantly recognized that bit of wall as part of Auschwitz because I stood in front of a wall just like that when I visited Auschwitz, while my friend next to me had no reaction until the camera panned out and revealed the whole height of the wall including the barbed wire and garden set up.

There's a lot of scenes like that in The Zone of Interest that you don't really get the severity of unless you have background knowledge about how Auschwitz was structured and operating. Take the scene where Hedwig Höß receives the watches for example; I don't remember there being context clues that these are watches from prisoners that got selected for her at the Kanada warehouses; so to someone who has no knowledge about Auschwitz she might as well be receiving an order she placed at some jewelry shop.

In that way ignorance is bliss, yeah, but it also robs you of a full understanding which I think is the case for many people who watched Mickey 17 and thought it's about Trump. I'm not saying that to gatekeep or to say I'm smarter than you. I'm someone who has no real pop culture knowledge, who constantly has references flying over her head. I'm saying sometimes you need additional knowledge to fully understand art, and if you don't realize that you might end up watching something and coming away with the feeling that it was bad or boring or had no point. And thinking Mickey 17 is about Trump does make the movie pretty boring.

Similarly this experience reminded me of when I thought it was a good idea to watch Katyń on a random weekday night: I knew what the movie would be about, I knew what would happen, I had read about the Katyn massacre, but to me there's a noticeable difference between reading about something and seeing something in visual art, because my own visual imagination is pretty bad. So after I had watched Katyń I couldn't sleep for hours and I had classes early in the morning the next day. The same thing happened with Mickey 17 except luckily I'm still on my semester break and had nowhere to be and could spend half of the night drafting whatever the hell this is.

All in all great movie, just some aspects of it might not live up to your expectations if you're going into this expecting another Parasite or if you're basing your expectations on the trailer. Which the adults of the 6-8 year old children who sat in our screening also had to realize after the movie turned to exploring the morality of death and dying as the main topic. They left very quickly after that, but these poor kids...

[homoquartz]

oh my god "the zone of interest" is one of the best-made movies i've ever seen. absolutely necessary viewing, and it's heavy

[yoymialterego]

The Zone of Interest

Hay una alta, gruesa, sólida pared que separa a los personajes y a nosotros mismos de la atrocidad, de la infamia, y Jonathan Glazer se cerciora sapientemente de nunca pasarla, de nunca ir más allá de ese punto limítrofe en su cinta "The Zone of Interest". Sin embargo, el director británico se asegura de estar literalmente siempre junto a ello, y de que percibamos, de que palpemos, de que realmente sintamos el horror tan próximo, tan inmediato y estruendoso, y no obstante tan furtivo, tan rotundamente ignorado.

"The Zone of Interest" es una película inteligente, escalofriantemente inteligente. El primer signo de estremecimiento que nos muestra es que hay siempre (es decir, siempre, siempre) un ruido de fondo que pretende ser el sonido del día a día, y seguramente bajo las circunstancias lo es, pero que para la cinta representa más bien un signo omnipresente de algo claramente ominoso.

Y es que la perversidad está en los detalles: mitigados estruendos de disparos, planos con enormes chimeneas en erupción de colosales cantidades de humo, soldados paseando mientras la pareja protagónica discute en un tono de drama tradicional, los diálogos nocturnos hirientes de esa misma pareja (cada cual en su cama individual) antes del reparador sueño, los paseos al río cercano para una tarde de picnic o para una serena y tranquila pesca con caña, el festejo de un cumpleaños con una camaradería que se ve totalmente incondicional, la elección muy doméstica de unas piezas de ropa decomisada que llega en paquetes a casa del director. Vaya, la normalidad anómala al lado de la hecatombe. Pero una señal nos empieza a mostrar algo: la tranquila pesca se vuelve un chapoteo en el medio de un pantano de cenizas que fluyen.

Al lado de una recreación de época insuperable, hay en "The Zone of Interest" unas actuaciones notabilísimas. Christian Friedel como el comandante de Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, y la descomunal Sandra Hüller como su esposa Hedwig. La fotografía juega un papel principal aquí, y el aspecto formal en general es muy cuidado, y eventualmente brillante, sobre todo en su simbolismo, como esa especie de interludios del cuento de Hansel y Gretel que el padre cuenta a su hija y que se ilustran con escenas en un blanco y negro infrarrojo fantasmagórico, que marcan uno de los flancos donde se deja ver la barbarie (la bruja de la historia, como lo describe el que cuenta, es quemada viva en el horno). O los dramáticos reflejos rojizos y el humo que la madre de Hedwig observa por la ventana de su recámara en medio de la noche, donde su reacción es absolutamente sintomática: simplemente cierra la cortina y se vuelve a la cama. Al poco tiempo se va sin avisar. Seguramente no es remordimiento lo que esta mujer siente, sólo prefiere dar la espalda y seguir cerrando los ojos ante el estado de las cosas, y claro, seguir beneficiándose de la situación.

Vivir al filo del infierno seguramente tendría efectos perniciosos en la mayor parte de gente, pero Jonathan Glazer nos deja ver que no sucede así con los personajes que retrata. Son inconmovibles. Y la parte final le sirve (otra vez) como expresión simbólica: cuando trasladan a Berlín al comandante Höss todo es lujo y fiesta, brindis y orquestas tocando en animadas veladas. Los hombres con uniformes de gala, las mujeres con glamorosos vestidos. Planos fabulosos de escaleras, de salones de fiestas, de pasillos elegantes. Pero hay un viraje en el tiempo del comandante, que se ve de pronto rodeado del silencio y la soledad en el futuro, en nuestro presente, y su cuerpo reacciona con arcadas de vómito al verse allí, en los crematorios ya convertidos en museo, junto a la señora que hace la limpieza, donde se acumulan zapatos, uniformes, muletas, retratos de aquellas víctimas. Pero se trata sólo de una reacción somática de Rudolf Höss. No hay aflicción o remordimiento. En la soledad, el comandante sigue bajando escaleras hacia abismal obscuridad.

Lo sorprendente e irónico no es que Auschwitz estuviera encajado en el medio de bosques idílicos, ríos tranquilos y un núcleo familiar pudiente. Lo sorprendente, lo espeluznantemente sorprendente es que estuviera en el medio de la más absoluta indolencia, rodeado de una enorme desidia, agobiado por la más grande indiferencia.

[harrison-abbott]

[advancedessence]

The Zone of Interest (2023)

[moviereviews101web]

The Zone of Interest (2023) Movie Review

The Zone of Interest – Movie Review ABC Film Challenge – Oscar Nominations – Z Director: Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) Writer: Jonathan Glazer, Martin Amis (Screenplay) Cast Christian Friedel (13 Minutes) Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) Johann Karthaus Luis Noah Witte Nele Ahrensmeier Lilli Falk Plot: Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream…

[theresatreeofmanyone]

[hayaomiyazaki]

A24 limited print for USA release of The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer. Art by Neil Kellerhouse.

[theoscarchallenge]

Not sure how I feel about this film. It’s good, but I think maybe people I know talked too much about it so I was expecting.. more? The Zone of Interest received two Oscars, Best International Feature Film and Best Sound.

[mtonino]

Cinediario 2024 - febbraio

The Zone of Interest (2023) Jonathan Glazer

[massivemusicgladiator]

In 2024, my favorite movies were Wicked and The Zone of Interest. While they seem very different, both explore how easy it is to be wicked or engage in naive evil. They reveal how comfortable it can be to laugh at cruel jokes or pretend not to hear shrieks.

[rawafmovies]

-☠️