In Son of Saul, Hungarian
director László Nemes is tasked with representing on
film the horrors of working as a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Any
film that takes the Holocaust as its subject matter raises a challenging question: What
is the efficacy of representing the unrepresentable? Like any other artistic medium, a film can
preserve the collective memory of catastrophic events with the hope that we might remember
its victims and prevent its reoccurrence; such a film has the pedagogical role of teaching
us about greater injustices. Even still, films that deal explicitly with the
Holocaust must question the ethics and limitations of representing such an
event. Surely, we remember historical events through representation, but
representation can also be abhorrent, if only because the dead cannot defend
themselves. How can film, a medium known for its visual realism, depict an unspeakable
event that evades any realistic representation? A respectable film that
represents the Holocaust must also acknowledge the failure of its own representation.
Claude
Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah is a
documentary that does not seek to visually represent any scenes from the
Holocaust; instead, it documents the oral histories of Holocaust survivors.
Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,
meanwhile, asks: To what degree do we allow a Holocaust film to be
entertaining, or even funny? By not showing any acts of violence or cruelty in
the concentration camp, the filmmakers reproduce the same game with the audience
that main character and Father Guido plays with his son: We may need symbolic
fictions like those that art presents to us in order to interpret and
understand reality, but they can never directly show all of the world’s
complexity. The young girl wearing the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List reminds the audience of
the artificial nature of the film, and in doing so, articulates that a
celluloid strip of film could never come close to representing the actual event
of the Holocaust.
Having been the
production of such a large entertainment company as Universal Pictures, Schindler’s List feels dishonest or
impure. The studio may not have approved the film with the logic that the
Holocaust will sell tickets, but it must
have weighed profitability as a heavy variable considering the spectacular cost
of the film’s production. International films such as Son of Saul are largely state-funded, made cheaply, and do not feel
as suspect to the moral trappings of Hollywood. Son of Saul is a Holocaust film that urges us to consider the moral
tension between ethics and aesthetics inherent
in the act of artistic production. This tension is foregrounded in the film’s
cinematographic style.
Son of Saul mercifully disorients the viewer through its busy camera work.
Despite the fact that the extremely shallow depth of field allows us to see
only blurry figures in the background we still feel fully immersed in the
environment. In the very first scene of the film we realize with creepy
horror that we are inside the gas chambers. There is a weird effect of
withdrawal and disturbing intimacy all at once. Saul may always be within arms reach of us and occupy most of
the frame, but he never has our full attention. We are more interested
in the dark labyrinth that he is forced to navigate. In this way the film removes
many of the typical cinematic codes and narrative tropes that define Holocaust
films: there is no love story, no montage of terrified families being rounded up,
no birds-eye-view of ghettos and, perhaps most strikingly, no music. Instead, we are perpetually accompanied with the
sound of clanging metal, buckling gears, the sweeping of blood, and the
shoveling of coal (or ash). This is
mass murder in the banal guise of a day's work.
On the narrative level, Son of Saul is about an imprisoned man
rushing to provide his son a proper Jewish burial. We soon learn, however, that
this boy is not Saul’s son. Throughout the film Saul endangers not only his unit but
also obstructs their plans of escape, compelling us to question both his
motives and his sanity. In the final scene of the film another boy appears in
front of Saul. At first we do not know if he is envisioning a phantom or a real, live child. Saul’s ensuing smile is profoundly cryptic. The film’s ambivalent ending
leaves us as an active participant, full of thought. According to critical
theorist Jacques Rancière, pensive endings both “extends the action”
and “puts every conclusion in suspense.” The kinds of questions that the film
raises concerning religion, torture, and mourning will continue to exist outside
of the theater in the mind of the viewer, fostering a kind of dialogue.
One of the larger questions that Saul’s mad quest provokes is: How do we go on knowing that we are being manipulated? Religion and culture assert that there
is something more than bare life. Perhaps Saul is simply choosing religious
duty over the duty imposed on him by the Nazis. Religion, in this case, is
presented as the last bastion of respect. Only in religious tradition do we find
symbolic activities that instate meaning to life. There is still the question
of Saul’s imaginary familial relation to the boy. Perhaps Saul’s delusions are
a product of the Nazi’s systemic torture. Forcing Saul, a Hungarian Jew, to aid
in the dismemberment of his own culture creates a profound guilt and disrupts
the way he organizes the world. He may very well begin to view the prisoners
whom he is tasked to escort to their death as family members.
Son
of Saul’s original visual style is informed by Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of representation. “The image is not a duplicate of a thing,” he
writes. “It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible.”
It is this understanding of representation that makes Son of Saul unique as a Holocaust film. The
background through most of the film is shockingly suspended, leaving us with a
hallucinatory, psychotic experience that is at once intensely real yet at the
same time uncannily withdrawn and unspeakable. Through muffled sounds and
distorted images, Son of Saul succeeds in restoring not a full presence but a spectral
intimacy to the event and the suffering it engendered.
Both the “son” of Saul and the film Son of Saul ought to be interpreted as constructive fictions. One
is a corpse that will inspire a character’s ensuing actions; the other is the
first piece of a Director’s corpus that will inform our collective memory of a
historical event. As Saul does with the child's corpse, we should take László
Nemes’ debut feature film as an opportunity to respect and mourn the dead.
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