“Saul’s son”: Auschwitz-film is an excerpt from the horror – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The most surprising of the Auschwitz-drama “Saul’s son” is well aware that Claude Lanzmann has given the film his blessing. Lanzmann has provided not only the most comprehensive cinematic exploration of the Holocaust with his ten-hour work “Shoah” by 1985th He formulated the same time a kind of prohibition of images related to the dead of the concentration camps. In his film, no bodies were seen, only the images of cleared stock.

Against this prohibition Hungarian author and director Nemes has his Auschwitz drama “Saul’s son” so aggressively violated, that he could not have made without the endorsement of the moral authority Lanzmann. Because Nemes designs not only pictures of the gas chambers, of corpses, ash mountains, he adds rather along a breathless dramatized photo hunting.

Where these images are doubly framed: Firstly, they are in the Academy format, almost square picture, captured literally. Here nothing can break free from its constraints and develop life of their own.

And secondly, there’s the sound.

Because the first thing you clearly perceives when “Saul’s son,” the whimpering of a woman. The image is blurred in the background, some people have to guess in a wooded area. But since you are in a film about the last months of the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, the head focuses faster than the camera. You know what will be seen equal and therefore fears it even more. This game with the senses and the memory, the inside and outside of the frame, it’s what so assumes one Nemes’ debut film in fitting is. To pull away, is a struggle. To yield him no less distressing.

When the doors close, holding the camera briefly held

Focus of the film is Saul foreigners (Géza Röhrig). He is part of the so-called Sonderkommando of Auschwitz: These are prisoners who may delay their own murder by a few weeks, by helping the Nazis during gassing and burning their victims. Mátyás Erdély’s camera follows Saul with knappstem distance through a day in Auschwitz. Over his shoulder one sees how people are driven out of the forest in the anteroom of the gas chambers. There they are only a shower, then promised hot soup. For the shower they should be pulled out quickly and rush into the chambers with the heavy doors. When these doors close, the camera for a moment stops. Then the cries of the people and their strikes against the doors employ.

“Saul’s son” in May 2015 had its world premiere at the film festival of Cannes, we suspected in our first review that the film would draw discussions to whether Nemes has crossed ethical boundaries in which he shows and as he shows it: the anonymous corpses; the naked body, the Saul and the other loops of the details behind them, to bring them from the gas chambers to the crematoria; the ash mountains that are shoveling the survivors in the port in the river.

In fact, these discussions went strangely depressed. This may also have been because “Saul’s son” in Cannes, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize, the largest award after the Palme d’Or and has not let up prices. In January won Nemes Golden Globe, in February the Oscar for best foreign language film. In this run have been scattered sporadically critical voices, especially in English-speaking countries. “How ‘Birdman’ and other tour-de-force endurance test keeps us ‘Saul’s son’ with its inescapable technique, his vexatious subjectivity under control,” David Edelstein wrote in “New York Magazine”.

“Was there suspense in Auschwitz?”

“If ( Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944 – d Red .. ) the place for a thriller? Were there suspense in Auschwitz? “asked Stefan Grissemann as decided critic in” film Comment “. Such questions most colleagues would not make so Grissemann, they were sure to relieved “that the Holocaust film, this dreaded subgenre, suddenly so new, so exciting, so alive comes The problem is:. To vibrancy was not there at the Shoah, and excitement was not its main feature in his pursuit of controversy explores ‘the son of Saul’ unsuspected new depths of revulsion “

In Germany, however, remained mute -.. forced because “Saul’s son” had been so long without a German start date that in Nemes’ native Hungary already were increasing voices that asked for a conspiracy against the film. Also not exactly flattering to the German film industry had Nemes’ remarks that he had received only refusals from German donors beforehand and the Berlinale, when he submitted the film as the first, had merely offered the panoramic side row for the world premiere.

Almost a year after its world premiere, ball placed on the attention wave that has struck the Oscar, is finally seen in German cinemas “Saul’s son”. And finally is also a dispute over the film. “That is, aesthetically refined indeed, the same concentration camp kitsch, we in ‘Schindler’s List’ saw ‘, criticized him Verena Lueken in the” FAZ “:” A fantasy of meaning under the pretext of a’ whole new gaze ‘What for. ? ” In the “Tagesspiegel” January Schulz-Ojala judges Nemes have ultimately created a relatively commonly constructed thriller. “A ghost train ride is ‘Son of Saul’ objectionable shower.”

A final act of self-assertion

In fact, driving Nemes and his coauthor Clara Royer a literally brutal dynamic of events in the camp ahead. “Saul’s son” is located in time so that the camp double emergency rule: The Red Army is getting closer, which is why the camp commanders want to overclock the mass murder even faster.

The subsequent roar, pushing, shooting, blades makes Nemes as nervous sentiment on the benefits and pushed it further by letting Saul pursue an obsession: A boy who survived the gas chamber, but in connection is killed indiscriminately by the camp doctors, to be his son. To give him an adequate, ie Jewish funeral, Saul makes on a mission that makes him additionally lawn throughout the camp, in addition to his duties as a member of the Sonderkommando. If he succeeds in this – presumably last – act of self-assertion?

The game with the hope that Saul could succeed against all probability, result in fact in a kind of thrill that can adopt a what is happening with voltage. dismiss this narrative approach by pointing out that there was no tension in the camp, however, leads to argumentative Nothing. Cinematic qualities always inhere only films, not historical situations. So the question must be whether accompanied new insights or perspectives with this approach rather. By showing gripped by infernal bustle Auschwitz, succeeds Nemes, the ideas of the concentration camp as bureaucratic exact killing complex add the image of a machine that its gears stands before the end of the eternal mesh shortly before overheating.

In this situation, the space for the display of Saul is happening on the acting person. He acts according to the instructions of the Nazis, contrary to its instructions, at our discretion. The cliché of supposedly fatal passivity, had met with the Jews the Holocaust – and the Quentin Tarantino “Inglourious Basterds” was added to his deputy revenge fantasy -, has “Saul’s son” so far from him.

At the same time here confirmed that Nemes has not only figuratively but also in content to offer a remarkably deliberately ensures excerpt from the Holocaust. It can supplement the representations from other films in the best sense, but out of context falls his film apart. Lanzmann’s “Shoah” would be the most important staple, the “son of Saul” together. Topics such as the active resistance of the Jews against their destruction are worked not only very prominently with him. As Richard Brody has shown in “New York”, are single file, such as the Jewish burial of a man who had died in the Warsaw ghetto, direct inspiration for the story of “Saul’s son” was by his wife.

You do not have therefore Nemes’ film dismiss as “concentration camp kitsch” to but to come back in “Shoah” as TERMINATION film about the Holocaust. It was probably in our own interest that Lanzmann “Saul’s son” has given his blessing.