{"id":1970,"date":"2016-01-19T04:44:15","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T04:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1970"},"modified":"2019-01-04T02:34:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T02:34:21","slug":"son-of-saul-holocaust-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/film\/son-of-saul-holocaust-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"“Son of Saul”: Holocaust 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the inconceivable role played by the German concentration camp Sonderkommando<\/em> as its premise, this current feature, winner of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Palme d\u2019or<\/em>, leads us squarely into the contemporary impasses that the enduring legacy of the Holocaust poses. We can, like its protagonist, Saul Ausl\u00e4nder, increasingly obsess on the Final Solution as a moral and systematic insult perpetrated against all of humanity; we can begin to imagine those small increments of dignity and recognition, such as ritual burial of the dead, that might restore what anomie and genocide (or \u201cbecoming-death\u201d) have definitively ravaged. Or, fearing to betray the living through resolute duty to the dead, we might elect instead to hurdle forward at whatever the cost, in resistance to brute force and deadly repression.<\/p>\n

\u201cSon of Saul\u201d is far less the rendition of a story, even a very odd one, a Sonderkommando\u2019s<\/em> frenetic efforts, amid impossible conditions\u2014to arrange proper Jewish burial of a lad who emerges (at first alive) from the heaps of corpses produced, industrial-style, by the gas-chamber\u2014than it is the cinematic creation of a virtual environment in which we dwell for the duration of the film. The particular virtual environment opened up by \u201cSon of Saul\u201d may well be the one we\u2019d least like to inhabit in the world: it is a full-service concentration camp, and since it is in Poland, we may just as well assume it is Auschwitz, the jewel in the crown. We shuttle back and forth between the vestibule where prisoners strip and are stripped of their possessions, where promises of such basic amenities as hot soup or tea upon completion of their \u201cshowers\u201d are held out to them; to the corpse-strewn gas-chamber itself, which must be voided and cleansed; to the lifts conveying loads of corpses (\u201cSt<\/em>\u00fccke<\/em>,\u201d or pieces) into the crematorium; to the \u201cCanada\u201d where appropriated possessions are sorted, shelved, and stored. The Sonderkommando<\/em>, for an indeterminate reprieve on their immanent executions, furnish all the grunt labor demanded by this grisly operation: dragging corpses away, shoveling mounds of human ash into the river, disinfecting the gas-chamber in time for the next \u201cshipment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The German soldiers in charge never allow the SK<\/em> to flag in their industry (\u201cArbeiten! Arbeiten!”). The film is remarkable\u2014and here it tips its hand more toward the tradition of Russian film-making (Tarkovsky, German) than toward Hollywood, Cinecitt\u00e0, or Paris\u2014in that simulating<\/em> the environment and the experience<\/em> of the death-camps is a far higher priority than telling the story, even such an intricate one as tacks the film together: Saul\u2019s unwavering devotion to the human remains of a child who is most likely not his. Otherwise put: any narrative assembled by this artifact is as much pieced together from near-constant noise, brutality, chaos, annihilation, actual or threatened, and forced acceleration (\u201cSchneller! Schneller!\u201d) as it is the result of a coherent and fittingly allegorical story-line. This virtual environment may be the product of reconstruction, but what it simulates was, once upon a time, and remains, in the public Imaginary, only too real.<\/p>\n

Such are the protracted horrors of this genocidal world that the camera\u2019s eye, let alone our own, cannot dwell too long or too directly on what we know is transpiring in this place. Auschwitz is no Hermitage, but in the camera\u2019s relentless movement, hand-held throughout the action-scenes that are the mainstay of the film, \u201cSon of Saul\u201d becomes the horrific counterpoint to Sokurov\u2019s \u201cRussian Ark.\u201d The cinematography is literally on amphetamines. \u201cSon of Saul\u201d spares us nothing of the auditory experience of command, intimidation, mockery, mass death-throes and beating against locked doors, shrieking, pleading, and shooting–the all too believable soundscape of military-industrial annihilation.<\/p>\n

But within the visual domain, the film must, in the interest of its own possibility as a social artifact, to some degree curtail the realism and directness of its representation. To be sure, \u201cSon of Saul\u201d enlists us in bearing witness to the death-agony of the dying \u201cSt<\/em>\u00fccke<\/em>,\u201d their harrowing screams and pounding as the Zyklon-B takes effect, to heaps of corpses, to random shootings of prisoners when the assembly-line of death has reached capacity; but just as much is conveyed, visually, by constant close-ups of Saul\u2019s and other recurrent characters\u2019 faces as they go about servicing the machinery of genocide. The horrific logistics of Auschwitz\u2014the human remains, ashes, etc., are, as it were, the in-motion marginalia to these talismanic faces, as on a medieval illuminated page. \u201cSon of Saul,\u201d in its tribute to the face as the quintessential display-screen of human emotion and experience, has few equals since the heyday of the great silent features, such as Dreyer\u2019s 1928 \u201cJeanne d\u2019Arc.\u201d It is in the interest of the indirect visual display of the nearly inconceivable that accompanies direct depiction whenever it is possible that the cinematography also resorts to extended sequences out of focus. It is with just such a blurred canvas that the film begins. With agonizing slowness, the still-shot of a field \u201cclarifies\u201d to reveal that while two inmates have managed to copulate in a ditch on the left side of the frame, a group of SK<\/em> is advancing on the right.<\/p>\n

Not that this film in any way lacks a story-line. It is one brilliantly highlighting the chief conflict posed by the Holocaust, to its cultural heirs as well as to its historical victims. The crux of the matter is conveyed by a line directed at Saul by one of his closest SK<\/em> comrades after he manages to lose a packet of gunpowder, destined for in-camp insurrection, in his increasingly tenuous quest to secure a rabbi and sanctify the boy\u2019s remains: \u201cYou failed the living for the dead.\u201d The story has placed Saul in the crosshairs between two counter-plots. The more encompassing one has been wrenched into action from the moment we are party to the concentration camp doctor\u2019s treatment of the surviving boy; the second one involves planned resistance on the part of the SK <\/em>(at the inevitable moment when they, in their roles as Geheimnistr<\/em>\u00e4ger<\/em> or \u201cbearers of secrets,\u201d have been slated for extermination). In return for cooperation in the endeavor of locating a rabbi, Saul is granted unusual liberty in roaming the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex by his peers and enlisted to assist them in their revolt: most notably to convey to them a packet of gunpowder from one Ella Fried in the \u201cCanada\u201d of stolen possessions.<\/p>\n

In arguably the most apocalyptic scene in a jarringly otherworldly film, Saul seeks out a rabbi at a moment of overload in the death machinery. Amid a backdrop of bonfires, the Nazi troops form shooting-squads to liquidate the naked prisoners in front of burial-pits. Saul has already picked up the gunpowder from Ella. An authentic rabbi that Saul tracks down amid the stampeding crowd, a gaunt, bearded figure, meets his fate by gunshot while a second bearded prisoner, a random one, passes himself off as a rabbi. Saul saves this fortuitous new acquaintance, changing him out of a telltale inmate\u2019s uniform and grooming him as a fellow SK<\/em>. In the melee Saul manages to return to his SK<\/em> unit with the imposter, but in a costume-change of his own, has let go of the precious packet of ammunition. This scene takes place at the apogee of the film\u2019s cinematic hand-held violence. It highlights the choice that was evident to any of the \u201csmart money\u201d standing by as the Third Reich consolidated itself and implemented its totalitarian apparatus: between certain death in armed resistance or sublimated spiritual life prolonged by sustaining, against all odds, such transcendental ethical values as non-violence and respect for the dead. A generation before the Final Solution, Walter Benjamin confronted the same impasse in his 1921 \u201cCritique of Violence.\u201d In this text, he carefully constructs a scenario in which armed resistance to the suppression of organized labor, set within a framework of \u201cdivine\u201d as opposed to \u201cmythical\u201d violence, is warranted.<\/p>\n

Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; \u00a0divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. \u00a0The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.<\/p>\n

This divine power is not only attested by religious tradition but \u00a0is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned \u00a0manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations. (Selected Writings<\/span>, \u00a0I, 250)<\/p>\n

Nota bene<\/em> that \u201cthe educative power,\u201d care for the cognitive integrity of the upcoming generation, lines up with the \u201cdivine violence\u201d that would \u201caccept violence\u201d in the name of the living. Saul\u2019s obsession with the sanctity of a boy, the fact that a silent encounter with a living local boy is the last human touch before annihilation, is no casual matter. Benjamin\u2019s discernment early on, even from his privileged provenance, of a rationale for organized resistance against totalitarian repression, in no way undermined his lifelong friendship with the Kabbalist Gershom Scholem or his captivation with religion in general as a persistent and dominant cultural medium for folk-wisdom and mythical narrative.<\/p>\n

The mixed results that Saul achieves in his crossed mission are not lost upon his comrades, who have, in spite of their skepticism, supported him in his fervor.<\/p>\n

SAUL: I have to take care of my son. He\u2019s not from my wife.<\/p>\n

FELLOW SK<\/em>: When did you last see him? You have no son!<\/p>\n

Saul is still trying, frantically, to bury the corpse at the moment when the SK<\/em>\u2019s resistance, rendered all the more futile through lack of ammunition, breaks out. The film\u2019s denouement is a chaotic unraveling of all efforts to achieve the moratorium of sustainable life under conditions of systematic annihilation\u2014whether these involve bearing up under impossibly brutal conditions (with a sheer resolve preparatory to the state of Agamben\u2019s Muselmann<\/em>), armed resistance at all costs, or religious sublimation. Suffice it to say that all the characters\u2019 plans and aspirations along with the story\u2019s plotlines, meet a dead-end worthy of the Final Solution\u2019s socio-political, military, and technological premises. The rare coordination between concerted cinematographic style and narrative subtlety that director L\u00e1zl\u00f3 Nemes has achieved in \u201cSon of Saul,\u201d not to mention the inspired performances that he has elicited from G\u00e9za R\u00f6hrig (as Saul) and fellow cast-members, ensures the film of enduring luster in film-history in addition to its well-deserved current acclaim.<\/p>\n

During \u201cSon of Saul\u2019s\u201d blurred visual rhapsodies, the \u201csubjects\u201d of scrutiny revert from the familiar Sonderkommando<\/em> and their Nazi overseers to what are cinematic ghosts or shadows. The filmmakers signal in this fashion that the ghosts of the Holocaust\u2014however this mega-happening fares on the stock markets of historical re-iteration and contemporary public opinion\u2014are very much alive. Not only alive; they are particularly malevolent and still threaten escalating catastrophe. This whether we bemoan (as in Rwanda) the non-existence of activism and empathy with respect to local genocidal conditions and other instances of militaristic barbarism, and the masses of refugees inevitably streaming away from these incursions; or whether we critique \u201cmining\u201d the World War II Holocaust as an inexhaustible source of moral smugness, a readymade posture of ethical \u201csense-certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact remains that the historical WW II Holocaust, as an extreme of arbitrariness, brutality, and anomie in the arrangement of human affairs, remains with us as a paradigm, the acid-test held up to current predicaments that might just get out of hand in a massive and irreparable way. These range from crises ensuing from critical resource shortages and climate change to nuclear threat, to the crash of electro-cybernetic infrastructure, to the demographic aftermath of intractable wars, to the despoiling of the environment. Indeed, arbitrary, intractable destructiveness and anomie do emerge, periodically, from socio-political infrastructure; the Holocaust, persists as their measure, intact and in-dwelling. It is the very Imaginary lurking at the extremes of more recent challenges that humans, on a planetary scale, have posed to civility, coexistence, collaboration, justice, and due process.<\/p>\n

BIBLIOGRAPHY<\/p>\n

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacher<\/span>. Stanford UP. Stanford, CA, 1998.<\/p>\n

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings<\/span>, I (1913-1926). Harvard UP. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Cambridge, MA., 1996.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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