Show don’t show (huh?)

One of the best writers’ dictums is ‘Show don’t tell’; which basically means, describe actions not motivations. Check out the films of Polish director, Krzysztof Kiewślowski. In his movie, ‘The Double Life of Veronique’, dialogue is minimal. We already understand what’s happening from action, movement, situation.

But after watching English film director Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ based on the real life story of Auschwitz concentration camp commandant, Rudolph Höss, I was intrigued by the movie’s palpable ‘ill-at-easeness’. Glazer manages to create this without showing any scenes of brutality and suffering inflicted on Jewish inmates at the camp.

Other than a subdued, almost subliminal soundtrack of nearby shouting and cries and constant palls of black smoke rising in the distance, we see nothing of the camp or what is going on. Instead we watch Höss and wife Hedwig raising their five young children in an idyllic setting adjacent to the camp, literally metres from the horrors on other side of a high wall.

The Höss household - situated on a large, private property with a flourishing garden, slippery dip and swimming pool - emerges as a wonderful place for a family to live and children to grow up. So the main concern comes when Höss receives orders he will be transferred to another location.

In this context, Hedwig’s dismay at the thought of being uprooted, and determination to stay on at Auschwitz with her kids, even in the absence of her husband, turns into something so abhorrent it is barely watchable.

There is no need for us to see the camp and its inmates. Such scenes are already emblazoned in our minds from other movies and documentaries over the years. What we are left with is something equally disturbing, the most blinkered indifference to the suffering of others that human beings are capable of.