Festival Coverage from Zach Dennis and Andrew Swafford
This year’s TIFF was perhaps Cinematary’s most enjoyable experience at the festival yet, as we both saw a plethora of great movies and very few that seemed as though they missed the mark. Below you’ll find long-form reviews of eight narrative features and two avant-garde short films that kept us thinking long after the credits rolled. Almost half — American Fiction, The Boy and the Heron, The Holdovers — have already played to wide audiences to widespread praise, but we hope you’ll also seek out those that are a bit off the beaten path. Additionally, you can hear some of our immediate TIFF reactions in podcast form as part of Episode 457 of the Cinematary podcast.
CLICK TO READ INDIVIDUAL REVIEWS…
American Fiction
The Boy and the Heron
The Delinquents
Evil Does Not Exist
Four Daughters
The Holdovers
Laberint Sequences
The Royal Hotel
Quiet as It’s Kept
The Zone of Interest
…OR SCROLL TO READ THEM ALL!
American Fiction
Cord Jefferson, USA
Review by Andrew Swafford
Although the life of a film critic may seem lavish and swanky to readers raised on Ratatouille, I’m actually living the increasingly untenable life of a schoolteacher – more specifically, teaching the subject of this film’s title. When the opening scene presented protagonist Thelonius Ellison (a gleefully, overtly allusive name) trying and failing to initiate a class discussion on the problematic-yet-nonetheless-brilliant work of Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor, I damn near had a trauma flashback. And as someone who has encountered more than my fair share of Young Adult literature in the education world, I’m well-acquainted with the world of liberal-pandering fiction that this film is lampooning. I could name more than a handful of prominent authors Issa Rae’s character is essentially playing here, but I don’t want to come across as attacking any of them – they’re doing important work of consciousness-raising, as Cord Jefferson’s film eventually concedes. But the writing? It often ain’t great.
In American Fiction, Thelonius Ellison is an unhappy teacher and an unsuccessful writer whose work is considered by major (white, liberal) publications to be “not black enough.” And as someone devoted to the craft of writing, he refuses to write the sort of broad-strokes trauma-porn they tend to publish. Hilariously, Thelonius goes what I hope the kids still call “Joker Mode” (or is it “Goblin Mode?”) and writes the most blaxploitation-esque crime “memoir” imaginable. And although the act of writing can be notoriously difficult to make visually compelling in film, American Fiction employs what I’m assuming is a novel approach: letting actors play the scene as he’s writing it, breaking the fourth wall with the film audience but also an internal wall between the writer-character and his constructions. I’m only describing one small element of the maniacal, ever-evolving plot of American Fiction, a film Cord Jefferson has somehow sold to Amazon, presumably on account of the fact that it looks and feels like an Amazon original movie.
Many of the plot’s hyperactive pivots make the drama feel either unbearably schmaltzy or undeniably moving depending on your taste for the Big Streamer Original Movie Industrial Complex. By the film’s end, however, all prior cliché emotional beats begin to feel increasingly deliberate in their manipulativeness – as if Cord Jefferson (if that IS his real name) has himself insincerely written the most compulsively watchable soap opera he can as a way of smuggling past (white, liberal) corporate gatekeepers. Jefferson’s background is in journalism (Gawker, USA Today, The Huffington Post, The New York Times Magazine) and television (The Good Place, Watchmen, Succession), and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the type of writing (or rather, “content”) that attracts / holds eyeballs (as well as whose eyeballs they are). American Fiction seems designed to capture the eyeballs of the biggest white liberal audience possible so that Jefferson can teach some hard truths about their exploitative media diets while keeping them laughing every step of the way.
The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki, Japan
Review by Andrew Swafford
Walking into The Boy and the Heron was a little surreal: I couldn’t believe I was getting a chance to see a new film by Hayao Miyazaki. Perhaps the greatest animator in film history, Miyazaki is in his eighties and has announced his own retirement numerous times – and the last time, it felt real. The Wind Rises, released ten years ago at this point, was a profoundly melancholy film, a bittersweet reflection on a storied career that could only have been made by a great artist with a complicated relationship to his own work. It felt less like a typical Studio Ghibli fantasia and more like something Miyazaki needed to get off his chest: a personal admission to his audience that making art on an industrial scale comes with a moral cost. It was personal and powerful, but more importantly it felt final; it was a film that felt intended to be a filmmaker’s last film. What could possibly follow it?
A return to old-school Miyazaki magic, apparently: The Boy and the Heron is an idiosyncratic fairy tale about a grieving child who follows a strange bird into a portal to another world. The film’s narrative engine runs on so much dream logic that I can’t even fathom a clear way to explain much more beyond that, and it’s a wonderful feeling to have no idea where this old storyteller’s new yarn is going. Jam-packed with bizarre imagery and singular artistic flourishes, The Boy and the Heron is a reminder that what viewers love about Miyazaki is his boundless imagination. Much of what Miyazaki dreams up can be quite disturbing, as well: one early fantasy sequence involves a river full of dead-eyed fish chanting menacingly for the young protagonist to join them underwater, and the titular heron goes from strange to grotesque as a human face begins crawling out of its mouth.
As the film progresses, the realm of the possible expands further and further until the bounds of fiction themselves are approached: late plot developments involve an encounter with Miyazaki’s own author avatar, and the old man offers the keys to his kingdom of dreams and madness to his heir apparent, but only after imparting important wisdom about the value of personal uniqueness. The only true antagonistic force in The Boy and the Heron is an army of goose-stepping parakeets who all look identical to one another save for their pigmentation, which reads to me as the way Miyazaki sees the rest of the children’s entertainment landscape: bright and colorful, but ultimately conformist and devoid of soul. The advent of AI-generated art threatens the validity of human creativity even more than the endlessly brand managed (and Disney-dominated) animation industry already was. Perhaps Miyazaki has returned as a response to some perceived crisis of creativity – though Miyazaki appears to still have it in spades, especially if recent reports of him tossing around even more ideas for new films at the Studio Ghibli offices are to be believed.
I don’t think The Boy and the Heron feels like a swan song quite in the same way that The Wind Rises did; instead, it feels like a film by a man who feels newly energized and ready to make a lot more. I dearly hope that Miyazaki gets many more years to pursue his imagination.
The Delinquents
Roderigo Moreno, Agentina
Review by Zach Dennis
Tired of working? What if we do something else — what if we don’t work???
The Delinquents, the latest film from Rodrigo Moreno, poses the earth-shattering question infused with 70s cinema and a good heist thriller. Moran and Roman both work at a bank in Buenos Aires making their daily paycheck. This day, Moran sees an opportunity — Roman is leaving them a bit understaffed as he heads to have a neck brace removed — which means Moran will be the only employee attending to the vault.
As he makes his way out for the day, Moran leaves with nearly $700,000 in his backpack. This isn’t Ocean’s Eleven or Heat, he’s noticed by the camera (which is unattended) and is able to walk out with no one the wiser until the next week.
After pulling off the heist, he contacts Roman with a proposal: he’s going to turn himself in and serve three and a half years or less in prison for the crime. What’s Roman’s role? Hold the money until he gets out. When he does, the amount will make up both of the rest of their salaries for 25 years until their retirement.
While the three hour runtime may turn some off, The Delinquents paces itself well. The first part is more heist thriller: the fallout of the robbery, the beginning of Moran’s time in prison and Roman attempting to reckon with the deal he just made as eyes begin to land on him. The second part is much more relaxed. Tired of holding the money at home, Moran gives Roman a spot in the wilderness to visit and store the money; on the way home, Roman meets three people, spending the day eating, drinking and swimming with them in the beautiful Argentinian countryside.
The day changes him and sets him on a new path, one that he’ll find intersects with his incarcerated partner.
Moreno keeps the whole thing snappy though. It holds your attention, is frequently funny and has a sly, but smart, commentary on a city dweller’s desire to “live in nature.” Their perspective varies from Norma, one of the women Roman meets, who becomes his lover for a time. She’s free, constantly making choices in the present, and beauty, coupled with access to fresh food, open days and romantic evenings, seem intoxicating.
It also provides a false goal for the men. Would they really make it in nature? Would they really be content? Despite the on a whim decision to rob the bank, both Moran and Roman share drives and ambitions. The present mindset of the country appeals to them in their small doses, but may not seem tenable for a long future.
We never find out whether or not they come to that impasse, but along the way The Delinquents keeps us engaged. It’s hard not to get whisked away in the nature fantasy as the two men do, and that relinquishing to the present makes the movie’s ride even the more pleasurable.
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan
Review by Zach Dennis
It’s about keeping the balance, says Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), echoing similar pleas from other residents of Mizubiki Village. The small, rural mountain town sits not far from Tokyo, but it couldn’t be more different. Takumi’s family has been on this land for generations — he knows the area better than anyone, one resident tells the two talent agency members who come to Mizubiki to share a proposal for a glamping site near the town.
The proposal is met with skepticism from the residents. While many may just not want the attention to the town, they respond to the proposal with calm, measured answers — pointing out flaws in the plan, including the location of a septic system that would affect their drinking water source coming down the mountain and the lack of surveillance on the site 24/7, which brings concerns of wildfires and other accidents from campers unfamiliar with the terrain.
It requires balance, he says. If you want to live here, you have to adhere to the code that each of the villagers in the meeting follow. The water is a source of life for the village and it is up to them to make sure it is properly cared for so that the people below them will be able to keep its benefits, and so on and so forth.
Their pleas sway the two talent agents, but they aren’t the ones holding the stick. Reporting back to their boss, it becomes clear that a lot of the more vocal and radical concerns posed by members of the village are true. They need to get construction going soon and they don’t have time to reconsider anything.
The village will just have to learn to adapt.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s slow burn technique feels gentle but searing in Evil Does Not Exist — a tale in how we define progress and whether “progress” is always necessary, especially if it disrupts the balance of the land.
If you run a septic system along the water source, it will pollute the water and create a much unhealthier environment. It may just be your intention to create this experience for others, but what does that experience mean for those who are always there? Promises of leading to better conditions may seem aspirational now, but in the long run, the better is for those who directly benefit, not those on the periphery.
Ironically, I saw a news story from my hometown of Chattanooga about a proposed “work, live, play” development that will include restaurants, condos and activities around a new baseball stadium in south Chattanooga. In the article, the lead developer speaks to the city’s rotary club about all of the benefits it’ll bring. You’ll have places to eat! Your kids can play and get an ice cream! You’ll be able to catch baseball games near your luxury condo!
These types of developments harp on the benefits for all — you can get rid of Reagan but not trickle down economics, I guess. But that’s never the case. Workers still struggle to make ends meet and have no shot of progressing to the point where they could also take part in the litany of outcomes this development promises. It continues to isolate a degree of wealth and segregate cities by class. It engulfs more public into private.
Evil Does Not Exist never sees the outcomes of its proposals, but you know where it’s headed. In the end, we have to restore some sort of balance because that’s what we have control over. The water runs downstream.
Four Daughters
Kaouther Ben Hania, Tunisia
Festival Coverage by Zach Dennis
Halfway through the movie, the normally collected Olfa is shaken.
For the majority of Four Daughters, she’s been able to navigate the tragedy she’s chose to relive: her two oldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma, disappeared. Olfa is left with unsaid and unfinished business, along with her younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir.
Eya lands the blow.
Up to this point, Olfa has been open about her style of discipline — how she’s been able to keep her daughters in line with her determination and values that were instilled with her. She’s not afraid to make a scene, or even land a slap, if someone drifts from how she defines the role of the woman in Tunisian society.
So when Eya tells filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania that this film has given her freedom to express herself — a path she’s never been provided.
It’s clear that she’s opening up in a way. From the second her “older sisters” are reintroduced in the forms of actors (Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar), the camera captures both younger girls as playful and lively. Not to say they didn’t have that before — many stories of Ghofrane and Rahma include how they were able to connect with either sister, a lot of the time due to Olfa’s work schedule and their financial situation that kept them at home rather than out.
So when Eya gets honest about how she wants to be perceived, about how she wants to be seen as a woman, that her body is for her and not for her eventual husband — it stings Olfa.
Olfa retells the story of her wedding night. Her husband made advances on her as her family waited for her to consummate the marriage in order to continue the festivities of the wedding. She won’t do it, so her sister has to intervene — even going as far as to tell her husband to get her in the corner to make it easier to constrict her struggling.
It doesn’t work. Olfa proceeds to beat him and his blood stains the sheet that continues the procession of the festivities.
Womanhood for Olfa was never a traditional definition. She tells of growing up with her father not being around. Men would circle their house and beat on the doors and windows because the family was made up of daughters. With no patriarchal figure, Olfa took up the mantle and learned how to fight. She instilled that toughness in her daughters. Both Eya and Tayssir speak with conviction when they elaborate on what they seek from others, and even leading up to their disappearance, you can sense a determination from Ghofrane and Rahma.
Their conviction may not align with Olfa’s hardworn values, but they are determined just the same. After run-ins with others, Rahma isolates into a more religious figure. Eya and Tayssir tell stories about how she would flog them, and herself, for committing a sin. In one instance, she shared fantasies of stoning one of Olfa’s friends for becoming pregnant out of wedlock.
Conviction shifts as fluidly as lines between Four Daughters being a documentary or a narrative film do. At times, the more narrative moments overpower the matriarch and she is replaced by an actress of her own (Hend Sabry). What’s fascinating though is that she generally hovers behind. In one sequence set in a police station, the scene begins with Olfa acting against Karoui as her daughter. As the scene progresses, and Karoui as Rahma exits the room for a one-on-one between the officer and Olfa, the real Olfa shifts to the back of the room as the actor Olfa takes the reigns.
So when Eya speaks her truth, one that she admits will be revisited after the filming is over and may result in a slap, it feels like the facades of documentary are falling down. Olfa and her family are very open with the filmmaking team about their story, but that narrative doesn’t always encapsulate every feeling or emotion from herself and the two daughters still with her.
There’s still truth to be found, and the freedom of the camera opens up wounds not realized.
The Holdovers
Alexander Payne, USA
Review by Andrew Swafford
Like many an English teacher, I have a complicated relationship with Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams’ speech proclaiming business as the thing that keeps us alive but poetry the thing we stay alive for felt deeply inspirational to a much younger me. Having gone back to it in years since, so much of it rings false now, from its absurd pedagogy to its vaguely creepy glorification of not taking no for an answer in the carpe-ing of one’s deim. The speeches still stir the soul of course, but they mostly suggest to me now that the way to be a great teacher is to be Robin Williams – no one has been Robin Williams before or since, so understandably the job is hard. Now that I’m turning the corner on my first decade in education, I’m so grateful to see a film like The Holdovers, which feels deeply true in its depiction of the nature of the profession, both in its bitterness and its poetry.
Set in the winter of 1970, The Holdovers is a boarding school drama dressed up to feel plucked from a bygone era. From an old-school blue screen R-rating at the start of the film to a folksy credits-montage set to a wintry New England landscape, The Holdovers evokes a warm feeling of soft coziness that is immediately punctured by the sheer presence that is Paul Giamatti. Sort of a dark mirror of Robin Williams in Dead Poets, Giamatti’s Mr. Hunnam is blessed with a superhuman ability to insult his students. It is mainly in this way that the film isn’t quite going for realism: there is an elevated grandiloquence to the wickedly cruel insults peppered throughout its script. If you, like me, get a cathartic thrill out of hearing students called “snarling visigoths” among other such vagaries, rest assured that The Holdovers contains multitudes. And it must be noted that there is perhaps no better actor for this role than Paul Giamatti, who just downright relishes the barbarous wit of Mr. Hunnam. To me, the character feels like a personified amalgamation of every teacher’s meanest thoughts.
Mr Hunnam’s bitterness is excessive to the point of cruelty and comedy, but it’s not unfounded: as a teacher at a prestigious prep school, he has been pressured to reward mediocre effort from students who Da’Vine Joy Randolph at one point describes as “dumb and rich – a popular combination around here.” Teaching is an inherently emotional profession, and anger towards one’s students or the educational system at large is one of those emotions. The fact that we’re able to see Mr. Hunnam at his worst self is itself a cathartic thing to see as a teacher, considering teachers arise in the public imagination as stoic heroes who never complain because they do it for the kids!
For good and for ill, they do in fact do it for the kids. Much of this film’s plot involves Mr. Hunnam babysitting an angsty teen over Christmas, and observing the unique relationship that forms between teacher and student is ultimately what The Holdovers is most interested in. It’s an unexplainably gratifying experience when you do feel like you’ve formed a bond with and made a lasting impression upon a young person searching for mentors – and the film also emphasizes the fact that impression often imprints both ways. Paul Hunnam is a hilarious embodiment of the idea that teachers bring all of their personal flaws and histories with them into the classroom, and his story is a testament to the idea that teachers often grow just as much as students do when trying to get through to young people.
Laberint Sequences
Blake Williams, Canada
Review by Andrew Swafford
Cinema’s third dimension is perhaps its most underrated. Although 3D-IMAX did have a brief heyday in the 2000s and 2010s thanks to the immersive world James Cameron technician-ed into existence with Avatar, its popular use never transcended beyond being a rollercoaster simulator (and has unfortunately devolved into the unbearable ordeal that is the 4D-IMAX experience). However, few tools have quite so much potential to open new doors for cinema than 3D glasses in all their forms and functions. My mind was first opened to the wonders of 3D avant-garde cinema at Big Ears 2017 (which I also wrote about for Cinematary). The fest featured a 3D film slate curated by Blake Williams, whose absorbing feature film PROTOTYPE opened the festival and who joined Cinematary for a conversation about Jackass 3D ahead of the festival. Blake Williams is both a craftsman and a scholar of 3D cinema, and his recent shortform work has been no less dazzling than his feature.
Laberint Sequences, Williams’s newest work, takes as its subject a hedge maze in Barcelona, making of it a filmic structure appropriately labyrinthine. Through the slightly graying blur of Williams’s chosen set of glasses, the film presents its audience with varying vantage points of the maze in no discernable order until the film begins looping back on itself. I counted 2-3 revisits of the opening image before I got the impression that every trip through the maze was unique, and that the viewer wasn’t so much restarting but moreso going deeper with every go-round.
At the center of the film’s maze is a smaller one, more specifically a repurposed scene from a 1950s 3D experiment called The Maze. That film, originally in black and white, is here viewed at an ersatz angle and beamed out of a laptop screen, the glittering pixel-flare and 3D glasses giving this echo of the past a washed out overlay of vague, spectral color. The characters in the 50s film are themselves navigating a hedge maze, after dark, with only the light of a candelabra to guide their path. They discuss the best past to the center, with one character ultimately declaring that there is no center to find.
One experience I imagine I might share with Blake Williams is a tendency to view my own life through the prism of cinema, getting deeper into movies not only as a way of having all types of experience movies can provide (3D movies and avant-garde movies both opening a myriad of pathways), but also to see life through new lenses and vantage points. Now, I have no idea if Blake Williams meant to suggest that there is no “center” to cinephilia just as there is no destination to be arrived at in questioning the purpose or direction of our lives, but that was the thought that struck me as I experienced the final moments of this extraordinary film strobing across my eyes.
3D avant-garde cinema will never be the phenomenon Avatar was – it’s even possible that Blake Williams’s new film will never screen for an audience bigger than the one that gathered in Toronto’s Lightbox Theater, much as I hope that’s not the case. But the internal structure of film distribution is changing beneath our feet. To quote director Kent Jones, “there will be no death of cinema. Rather, it is in the process of being culturally marginalized, which means that it is assuming a proud place alongside poetry, dance, and concert music.” Only those willing to explore every corner of cinema’s own labyrinthine history will find singular experiences like this one awaiting them. Provided they have the appropriate 3D glasses and screen, of course.
The Royal Hotel
Kitty Green, Australia
Review by Andrew Swafford
Hollywood has taken several stabs at making a “movie of the moment” to capture the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement with movies like She Said, Bombshell, Promising Young Women, among others – but nobody nailed it quite like Kitty Green, whose 2019 feature The Assistant perfectly captured institutional predation by choosing never to show its face. In that film, Julia Garner plays a secretary in the office of a Weinsteinlike figure the audience never sees, and Kitty Green’s tight, controlled camerawork gives the clean, well-furnished space a sense of ambient threat that would otherwise remain completely invisible. The Assistant is a monster movie, but the monster isn’t even Weinstein – it’s the faceless, Kafkaesque bureaucracy propping him up.
In The Royal Hotel, Kitty Green’s follow-up to The Assistant, the monsters are everywhere. This, too, is a film about institutional rape culture, but of a kind far less insidious and clandestine. Set almost entirely in a rowdy bar that serves as a central watering hole for a remote Australian mining town, The Royal Hotel depicts sexual harassment against women at its most casual and flagrant, with all manner of unwanted attention and aggression shrugged off with “I was just being nice” or “it was just a joke.” In the world of this film, catcalling, misogynistic slurs, and physical violation is so normalized as to become almost blasé, and the one woman who attempts to push back against this everyday violence (Julia Garner, again), repeatedly finds herself dismissed or outright targeted in response. While The Assistant exposed a single machine from the point of its smallest cog, The Royal Hotel attempts to tackle the full breadth of sexual harassment experienced by women from a bird’s eye view, and the resulting story is more schematic than compelling.
The point that The Royal Hotel seems to make – that ordinary women are subject to sexual threat on an everyday basis – is one that I find valuable and important, but truth alone does not make for compelling cinema. While The Assistant communicated its ideas primarily through form, with the edges of the frame generating claustrophobic dread that can’t be fully communicated in words, The Royal Hotel is almost all verbal. And somewhat appropriately so: the various threats of The Royal Hotel lurk in mindless jabber drowned out by the din of a crowded bar. The cinematography and editing of the film, however, doesn’t do nearly as much to convey that sense of pandemonium as The Assistant did to convey its sense of eerie quiet. Perhaps following up a film as special as The Assistant is an impossible task, or perhaps working with a different cinematographer (and no longer working as her own editor) this time has made her filmmaking that much less potent – but whatever the case, The Royal Hotel feels ordinary and unremarkable by comparison.
Throughout the runtime of this film, I kept waiting for it to turn into a full-tilt home invasion movie. It has all the trappings: a remote location, a “final girl” protagonist, a town full of sketchy guys. There are even hatchets and jars full of snakes lying around, constantly hinting towards a more broadly appealing thrill ride hiding just under the surface of this indie social problem movie. In certain moments, things tip in that direction – shadowy figures breaking windows of locked doors and the like – but the film too often remains safely on the naturalistic side of the divide that separates so-called “art cinema” from supposedly lower-brow genre fare. If Kitty Green is going for a broad-strokes treatise on rape culture culminating in a violent catharsis that screams “burn it all down,” I wish the filmmaking were pulpy enough to make the whole thing a more bombastic experience. As it stands, The Royal Hotel seems to insist on not being fun, as though the pressure for a film to be enjoyable were the same as asking a woman to smile more.
Quiet as It’s Kept
Ja’Tovia Gary, USA
Review by Andrew Swafford
In the opening stretch of DJ Shadow’s seminal sample-based album Endtroducing, he features two key audio snippets of the jazz drummer George Marsh talking about his craft. In the second clip, which plays after the song has reached a dizzying peak of chopped up drum blasts and choral harmonies, Marsh calmly states:
“I would like to be able to continue to let what is inside of me – which comes from all the music that I hear – you know, I’d like for that to come out. And it’s like, it’s not really me that’s coming; the music’s coming through me.”
The sentiment clearly doubles as an explanation for DJ Shadow’s pioneering approach to what is now known as plunderphonics, but it could just as easily describe much of the video collage work coming out of contemporary avant-garde cinema: the work of Michael Robinson, the work of Arthur Jafa, as well as the work of Ja’Tovia Gary. Her new short film Quiet as It’s Kept is a brilliant piece of sample-based cinema that borrows freely from the worlds of literature, film, music, academia, and social media.
Quiet as It’s Kept, which takes its title from the late, great Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye, feels like Gary’s own personal manifesto as a black artist working in a white supremacist media landscape. Gary’s “voice” is most clearly heard through the voice of Toni Morrison, whose 1988 interview with Mavis Nicholson undergirds much of the film. Among other things, the always profound Morrison speaks about writing The Bluest Eye as a reader who was inspired to write a book she herself wanted to read in a literary world that so rarely centered the perspective of black women.
Whenever the concept of “the white gaze” is suggested throughout Gary’s film, it is often paired with a tiny Brakhage-esque flicker animation placed over the eyes of whatever figure is being depicted. What’s more, the color of this animation is meant to evoke the “Nazar,” the blue eye recognized as a symbol of envy the world over. In the English speaking world, envy is perhaps most commonly associated with “the green-eyed monster” of Shakespeare’s Othello, but Gary insists that blue is the more appropriate signifier, especially in a montage sequence made up of white teens consciously or unconsciously attempting to look/sound “black” for social media clout.
Gary’s film motions towards the rise of “blackfishing,” or “digital blackface” (two distinct but overlapping phenomena in the increasingly bizarre social media waters we swim in), as an interesting development in the evolution of popular culture. It is both a continuation of the ways in which white culture has continually plundered the cultural capital generated by black artists throughout history and a reversal of the dynamic Morisson was addressing in The Bluest Eye, in which people of color often attempt to appease or appeal to the racism of the white gaze. Nowadays, it is somewhat less common for black girls to desire blue eyes and more common for white girls to desire darker skin (but not too dark, of course, as highlighted by one clip Gary includes regarding colorism in Hollywood casting). Gary also acknowledges the unstated Eurocentric beauty standards of “Beauty YouTube,” as we see a black woman apply a full face of makeup, deep-blue eyeshadow, and a straight-haired wig before winking at the camera in a wickedly sharp piece of performance art. The evil eye of envy cuts both ways, Gary suggests, and it perhaps inescapable in a culture predicated upon such an obscenely hateful racial history.
All of the moving images repurposed and cleverly arranged in Gary’s film are too numerous to catalog here, but one in particular worth highlighting is an early Instagram story of now-famous rapper Azelia Banks begging Beyoncé to let her do a remix of “Brown Skin Girl” without Beyoncé’s lawyers wiping Banks’s work from the internet for copyright infringement. The legal dubiousness of sample-based art is as old as the genre of hip-hop, and still plagues artists working in various mediums to this day. DJ Shadow’s Entroducing has had a pretty easy go of it as far as legal challenges go, while plunderphonics masterpieces like Since I Left You by The Avalanches, The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, and Feed the Animals by Girl Talk can still be difficult to track down in their intended forms. This predicament feels especially dire for sample-based works of avant-garde cinema like Arthur Jafa’s masterful Love is the Message the Message is Death, which is entirely built upon Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” and isn’t available thorough any official streaming channels. Avant-garde cinema generally has very little in the way of established distribution channels in the best of circumstances, but I really hope the work of Ja’Tovia Gary is readily available for interested viewers in the future. Her perspective is an invaluable one.
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer, UK
Andrew’s Take:
It is entirely possible to walk into The Zone of Interest – the long-awaited new film from Under the Skin’s Jonathan Glazer – without knowing that it’s about the Holocaust. The theatrical poster simply displays an idyllic family gathering below a looming blackness in the negative space above. The words “Holocaust” and “concentration camp” don’t appear in either of the film’s trailers, but those who know what to look for will recognize occasional SS uniforms and the rooftops of Auschwitz peeking over the edges of certain foregrounded images.
The Zone of Interest depicts the Holocaust from a vantage point almost too despicable to imagine: those who perpetrated and benefited from it. More specifically, the film captures the humdrum daily life of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving overseer of Auschwitz, who lives in an ornate mansion just over the camp’s walls. The audience almost never sees him spending time in the extermination camp itself, but rather in meetings and phone calls where he’s going over architectural designs and negotiating where flowers should be planted, perhaps to give him something to look at when he makes his eventual rounds.
We spend just as much time with his wife (given a disturbingly cheerful performance by Sandra Hüller), who fancies herself “the Queen of Auschwitz” and sees her family’s situation as a fairy tale ending after a lifetime of hard work and ladder-climbing on the part of her husband. We watch her try on expensive furs and gift the rejects to her Polish slaves, an action she presumably sees as evidence of her own generosity and kindness. During polite conversations over tea, the audience sometimes hears the echoes of distant screams.
This is not to suggest that the film assumes the POV of these characters – rather, Glazer’s camera lens feels like an alien, omniscient force hanging just above the eyelines of these characters, surveilling and studying them with a cold, unblinking gaze in their most intimate and mundane moments. We watch these characters walk from room to room in a house that never coheres into an imaginable blueprint but rather feels a never-ending labyrinth of excess and emptiness. We see their children playing with toys and imitating their father with pride and admiration.
Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil” can’t help but jump to mind when witnessing these architects and beneficiaries of genocide go about their daily lives, but perhaps an equally relevant concept is that of compartmentalization – the way in which the human mind puts up walls between ones central consciousness and the images it finds too disturbing to confront directly. In The Zone of Interest, we never directly see the violence of the Holocaust, an atrocity so monstrous that even its most openly sadistic perpetrators had to dress it up in coded language and view it as a distant abstraction.
Compartmentalization on this scale is, of course, never truly possible. The horrifying truth of what these people are doing is too great an evil to ever be completely ignored, an idea that is reflected in the film’s singular editing choices. Although the majority of its runtime is spent focusing on the things that the Höss family would rather occupy their minds with, there are a few key and powerful moments throughout the film when other perspectives abruptly and profoundly make themselves known. It is in these enigmatic moments that Mica Levi’s dark, rumbling score surfaces, guiding the viewer through nocturnal odysseys shot in stark black and white. These moments – which remind me that what most critics today call “slow cinema” was originally coined “transcendental style” – can only be explained by considering the way in which these disparate threads connect to one another on a spiritual level.
Perhaps The Zone of Interest’s most radical idea is that fascists, like all humans, have something akin to a soul or perhaps a sense of right and wrong – but the dehumanizing systems of bureaucracy they construct allow them to circumvent their own inconvenient complicity. The Nazis centered by The Zone of Interest are not mawkish, cartoonish caricatures of “bad guys” in the way that Nazis have been depicted in pop culture fluff like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jojo Rabbit – nor are they distant forces of unimaginable malevolence as they often are in stories that center Jewish suffering and death. Here, they are cold, calculated businessmen and politicians interested only in maintaining their own hegemony.
When we see fascists this way – as they are – it is much easier to recognize the evil they threaten to carry out again in the United States, as well as the evil they continue to carry out across the globe. The ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in China are not simply the result of a single tyrant going on a manic, destructive rampage, but rather the result of countless board meetings and contractual agreements between horrifyingly ordinary people who have somehow convinced themselves of their own innocence.
Zach’s Take:
Nazis are monolithic in their evil in popular culture.
It’s easy to envision them as the foils to Indiana Jones’ desire to preserve history or with a sinister snarl like Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. But unfortunately, that isn’t so clear in reality.
Recent history has told us that a Nazi doesn’t present themselves with a black SS uniform and a surprisingly British accent – they present themselves as normal people and for the most part as suit and tie individuals holding the highest office. It’s easy to look back today and say that we wouldn’t fall for it, we wouldn’t succumb to evil but 20/20 vision is a luxury in historical terms.
What director Jonathan Glazer asks us to reckon with in his latest film, The Zone of Interest, is what does evil look like in motion and would we sacrifice the pursuit of a better life and comfort to fight it.
Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is the commandant of Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazis’ concentration camps during World War II that slaughtered thousands of Jewish people. In his mind, this is a position of prestige and power in what he views as a growing country in Germany with the ability to lead the world. Set beside Auschwitz is a decadent, country home that his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) runs as tightly as her husband runs the camp.
Glazer lingers on the mundanity of their days. Rudolf leaves for “work” while Hedwig carries on the homely duties: the kids play, the house is kept up, the garden is tended to and there is always some brief time to settle into their backyard and take in the sun peeking through the billowing clouds of smog rising from the nearby camp that rings with screams and dogs barking.
Zone of Interest never ignores the evil. Instead, it places it in the background as Glazer lulls you into everyday life for a German family who tries to repress the atrocities being committed just over the backyard fence. It comes to a head when Hedwig’s mother visits the family and the daughter is finally able to show off her life’s work. They walk the garden and chat, they enjoy tea in a gazebo as her mother remarks on the children and the breadth of all this work done.
But a night of fire, smoke and screams wakes her mother in the night, illuminating her to what’s happening right over the fence of paradise. She leaves immediately.
There’s never an attempt to glamorize the evil committed Höss family, but Glazer attempts to paint a picture of how striving for comfort under the constraints of a hyper-capitalistic world can allow people to accept cruelty if it provides peace for themselves.
Cruelty can be thousands of miles away on a large strip of occupied land that has no direct effects on our daily lives or it can be literally over our fence.
Best of the Fest
Andrew’s pick
The zone of interest
Jonathan Glazer
ZACH’S PICK:
THE BOY AND THE HERON
Hayao Miyazaki
See you next year!