![]() ![]() (Doctors actually refer to the body as an “it”-a thing that needs to be taken someplace.) Eventually, Saul claims the boy is his son. Saul is drawn to him, and makes it his mission to find a rabbi to ensure the boy has a proper Jewish burial rather than be autopsied and incinerated. That is, until he sees the body of a boy on the verge of death, whom doctors quickly suffocate. Maybe that’s intentional, though-an effort by Nemes to suggest the psychological chaos that can exist in such a cruelly systematic environment.Īt the film’s start, Saul is a cog in this machinery: efficient, trustworthy, unshakable. Then again, time is hazy here, as are many elements of “Son of Saul.” Identities are unclear at times, even of characters who play pivotal roles. Saul is savvy and resourceful, traits he must use again and again to survive over the course of a harrowing couple of days. It’s a physical performance as much as it is a quietly emotional one he has to establish who this man is mainly through his gestures, demeanor and energy. Röhrig has the tricky task of carrying this story on his shoulders-and us along with him-without the benefit of being able to emote or even say much. But this is just a marvel of controlled filmmaking-a bold vision carried out with powerful simplicity, and an impressively assured debut form both Nemes and Röhrig as his star. If you’re not a fan of ambiguity, either from a narrative or moral perspective, you may have trouble here. “Son of Saul” is a movie that requires attention and patience, with a script from Nemes and Clara Royer that’s often wordless or whispered. Right away, we know we’re in the hands of a director who wants to tell the story of the Holocaust from a different perspective than we’ve seen before in films: a more personal, intimate one. The suggestion of the suffering is more unsettling than wallowing in it. The horror remains in the periphery, a blur, but it’s unmistakable: the pounding and screaming from behind the metal doors, the naked and lifeless limbs being dragged across the concrete floor once the doors have reopened. Some of his most recent publications are ‘Circuitous Journeys: The Migration of Objects and the Trusteeship of Memory’ (co-authored with Aubrey Pomerance), ‘The Witness Against the Archive: Towards a Microhistory of Christianstadt,’ ‘Testimony and Taboo: The Perverse Writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633,’ ‘The Lure of the Archive: The Atlas Projects of Walid Raad,’ ‘Migrant Visions: The Scheunenviertel and Boyle Heights, Los Angeles,’ ‘Twemlow's Abyss,’ and ‘Narrative Tensions: The Eyewitness and the Archive.’ He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art.Nemes stays close, showing us only what Saul sees, photographing him from the back or the side, Dardennes-style, as he walks purposefully toward each destination. His book Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture was published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature on biography and literary portraiture on testimony, Holocaust literature, and Berlin Jewish history and on debates about education. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the Free University Berlin and at the University of Toulouse, and is the director of Hampshire’s semester-long study abroad program in Berlin. Jeffrey Wallen is a professor of comparative literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts (and was Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies from 2012-2015). The essay also addresses Georges Didi-Huberman’s argument that Son of Saul presents a heroic revolt against the death factory at Birkenau, and it suggests instead that the film leads its audience to feel that it has faced evil and had the courage to confront the horrors it reveals, while actually turning away from the central challenges of grappling with the Holocaust. The essay explores questions about the limits of representation of the Holocaust, and it engages the ethical quandary that is at the heart of the film: the intense confrontation with the horrors of the Sonderkommando comes about by embracing a quest that involves betraying those who would (and did) communicate these horrors to the world. ![]() It is not an easy film to watch as it presents the view from inside the world of the men who were forced to shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and to dispose of their corpses, after first gleaning what was valuable from them. ![]() The essay analyzes the movie Son of Saul, a Hungarian film that immerses its viewers in the life of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau. ![]()
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