Cinema, like other art forms, introduces us to cultural and historical worlds beyond our own. Our Cornell resources include Cornell Cinema which shows a wide array of films and Cinemapolis, a non-profit theatre in downtown Ithaca. Nor should we forget the film resources of the Cornell and Tompkins County Libraries.
I would like to discuss The Zone of Interest — which has had a recent run at Cinemopolis and will play at Cornell Cinema on March 22 and March 29, 2024 — and Perfect Days, which has been playing at Cinemopolis, I will stress how I respond to these two very different films because of decisions the directors make to create structures of effects that shape our viewing.
The first, The Zone of Interest, is a semi-biographical Holocaust film which focuses on the rarified quality of life lived by Commandant Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel) and his family while running Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943 and again from May 1944 to January 25, 1945. On the latter occasion, called Operation Höss, the Nazi focus was on deporting and killing most of the 800,000 or so Hungarian Jews. At one point 420,000 Jews were transported to Auschwitz in 56 days and three quarters were killed while the others were forced into slave labor.
Director Jonathan Glazer focuses on Höss, one of the most sadistic members of the Nazi killing machine. He tries to balance his malevolent public life with a traditional family life. Sources of the film include not only Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest — a puzzling term (interessengebiet in German) for the 40-square-kilometer area surrounding Auschwitz — but also Höss’s own autobiography.
At the outset, although the Höss family lives adjacent to Auschwitz, the viewer is not fully aware of what is happening within Auschwitz. As if he were making a home movie, Glazer replicates actual Höss family photographs. To render the way the Höss family lived in comfortable splendor without intruding an immediate moral judgment, Glazer and his director of photography used ten cameras simultaneously to follow the Hösses in their home and on their manicured property.
Gradually Glazer evokes Auschwitz through horrific sounds and moments when only red or grey colors fill the entire screen. He also relies on brief images of trains arriving at Auschwitz, watch towers overlooking the prison and smokestacks of the crematoriums. Disturbing, too, are recurring almost surrealistic black-and white images of a Polish girl — who seems to live in the Höss complex — smuggling apples into Auschwitz and its environs.
The film foregrounds the contrast between, on one hand, the lives of Höss and his family living with servants on manicured grounds, and on the other, the unseen Auschwitz victims. Höss and his wife Hedwig have five children and are living the agrarian family life idealized by Nazis. They exploit local Polish women as their servants and Jews as their slaves.
Hedwig, a self-serving narcissist like her husband, verbally abuses and threatens the women who work in her house. In one compelling scene, she plans to tailor a fur coat that once belonged to a Jewish woman who is either doing slave labor or has been killed. Höss seems to be without human feeling to anyone but his family. Yet he no longer seems to be sexually intimate with his wife. Taking advantage of his position, he is a sexual predator.
To an extent how we view this film about a man obsessed with creating two separate worlds — his private utopia and his maniacal killing machine committed to genocide — depends on how much we know about the Holocaust and German history in the Nazi period. Glazer does not show what is happening to specific victims in the camp.
The disconnect between sounds and the expected but missing images of victims is quite disturbing. The film begins with three minutes of a blank grey screen; first we sit in complete silence then hear scratching and other cacophonous sounds. Later we hear the Auschwitz dogs barking, gun shots, distorted classical music (which in fact was played over the loudspeakers in Auschwitz) and human screams.
These sounds are supplemented by a presentation to Höss by the crematorium manufacturers, Topf and Sons, of how a newly designed and more efficient crematorium would work. The unseen human victims emphasize that death means nothing to Höss; victims are, to use the word used by a Topf representative, merely “pieces” in an industrial process: the Nazi killing machine.
In striking contrast to the decadence of the predatory life lived by Commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, Perfect Days (2023) is ahistorical, focusing on how one man makes sense of his life in the contemporary world and does so without a public life. Perfect Days is a Japanese film by German director Wim Wenders who has a strong fascination with American culture. After a slow and puzzling start we appreciate that repetition on which the film relies, with subtle variation about how a toilet cleaner named Hirayama (brilliantly played by Kōji Yakusho) makes his life.
Every workday repeats the same routine: he puts on his work suit, sprays his house plants, drinks the same coffee from the same machine, makes his toilet cleaning rounds, visits the same park where he eats a modest sandwich and takes photos with an old-fashioned camera of the same canopy of trees. While he is considerate (bordering on obsequious) to those who need to use the facilities that he is cleaning, this does not compromise his dignity.
Willfully routinizing the shape of his life, he goes to the same public bath where he takes pleasure in its rituals, enjoys a small helping of food at a working-class restaurant, has a drink at a bar (perhaps sake mixed with water) and periodically visits a bookstore. That he is recognized at these places clearly pleases him and makes him comfortable.
Each toilet Hirayama cleans is a little different —like his daily workdays — to foreground repetition with a difference. In a sense the seemingly straightforward present tense form in which the camera follows Hirayama becomes the message, namely, that a well-lived simple life matters.
We know little about Hirayama’s past; he has a wealthy sister from whom he is estranged, and he lives in the present. We assume from his face that he has a past. His wrinkles and expressions tell a story, but we are not sure what it is. We don’t know his age but assume he is in his early sixties.
What Höss and Hirayama have in common is a desire to insulate their private lives from history and to create a tiny world where they are insulated from what happens outside. A central part of the Nazi killing machine and a man who apparently works with Bormann, Eichmann and Himmler, Höss fails miserably at detaching his life from the atrocities of Auschwitz and was hung for war crimes in 1947.
Unlike the bullying, manipulative, and self-aggrandizing Höss, Hirayama rarely speaks but is sensitive to the small gestures of others, what we might call the subtle shadows people give off. Hirayama responds with empathy and sympathy to the human needs of others, whether it be the monetary needs of his irresponsible young assistant seeking sex with a young sex worker or his niece who has run away from his estranged wealthy sister’s home or a stranger he meets who is dying of cancer. That his niece begins to see the small splendors of his life subtly confirms its value. She learns, as he tells her, “Next time is next time. Now is now.”
Perfect Days is a film about looking and observing with a keen eye that revels in the small wonders of human and natural life and owes much to Wenders’ fascination with documentary. Through Hirayama, Wenders is urging us to see and care about small things. Minimalism of technique mirrors the film’s central point that we can celebrate a spare, decent life which, having meaning to the person living it, does not require some higher historical, religious or professional pursuit.
Synchrony
Synchrony has been used to describe the uncanny, including inexplicable coincidental or simultaneous occurrences of events; similar thoughts of people who seem to have little in common and might not know even each other; or unexpected events that seem not to be logically explained by causes. The term has also been used to describe something happening at the same time as opposed to diachronic which signifies something evolving through time.
However, without disregarding its ties to the uncanny, I want to use synchrony as a concept to explain how narrative as a process relies upon a specific formal rhetorical decision that an author or director uses to arrange the narrative and thus shape the viewer’s (or reader’s) response. What The Zone of Interest and Perfect Days have in common is synchrony, namely the way the past shadows the present and becomes part of it. Synchrony not only brings the past into the present but also enables us to see the juxtaposition of two time periods. Because it arrests if only momentarily the temporal process, the co-existence of past and present has a spatial dimension, a kind of narrative tableau, in the mind of the viewer or reader.
In The Zone of Interest, the disruptive sounds and brief images that define the world of Auschwitz hover over both the images of the Höss family life and our increasing awareness of him as a major figure in the Final Solution. Standing as metonymies for what is happening within the confines of Auschwitz, they co-exist with and modify our understanding of every scene, including the sheltered life of the Höss family. The incongruity between Höss’s public and private life and the impossibility of separating one from another are emphasized by the family compulsively washing after swimming in the Sola River adjacent to Auschwitz where ashes and human remains were dumped as well as by the elder son imprisoning his younger brother in a mock gas chamber.
For even moderately informed viewers, the historical arc that begins with the rise of Hitler and ends with discovery of the camps by the Allies is always present. With a present-day view of employees cleaning the windows of exhibit cases at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the film concludes by strongly referencing — with a view of the victims’ shoes — the contextual arc as if to suggest the impossibility of hermetically sealing private life from history as Höss and other Nazis tried to do. Put another way, as the film emphasizes, there can be no separation when viewing the Holocaust between now and next time. They exist synchronically because the future (“next time”) is always shadowed by a past that is a living “now” in terms of its effects on those who lived through the Holocaust and their heirs.
For Wenders’ Hirayama, life is now, including his appreciation of nature, especially the park canopy which delights him endlessly with its variations of light. Yet if Hirayama enriches his work with a commitment to doing it well and the pleasure he takes in his daily routines, for him the now is nurtured by sophisticated popular music from the past.
For Hiramaya, the then — his personal past — is hermetically sealed from history. Whether this is possible is a different question, and one that the film implicitly asks. In the sense that Hirayama is an obsessive collector of old-fashioned cassettes as well as serious books he reads nightly and countless photos of the tree canopy, his past is synchronically part of every day. These fragments of his past are shadows and yet, paradoxically, they emphasize that we know little about his past. Shadows — which we know are always present with the person or scenes casting the shadow — are apt metaphors for synchronicity. Because his dreams are rendered in black-and white — dreams that rarely reflect anything more complicated than the images of his prior hours — we can say the dreams are his shadow. At one point he plays shadow tag with the zeal of a young child with the man who is dying of cancer; perhaps Wenders is suggesting that death is always shadowing us and that the future will inevitably modify the present.
In Perfect Days, sound plays a very different role than in The Zone of Interest. Each morning, Hirayama chooses from his huge collection of cassettes from the 1960s and 1970: Van Morrison (“Brown Eyed Girl”), Lou Reed (“Perfect Day”) and The Animals (“The House of the Rising Sun”). That we never hear a song sung through may be a metaphor for the incompleteness of what we know of Hirayama’s past. These songs are shadows of a past — of a “before” preceding the “now” — but his past remains a mystery. At the film’s end, as he drives to work to begin a new week listening to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” Is he exhilarated or sad or both?
Yet, the viewer needs to be aware of what is left out. Except for a few details, we know little of Hirayama’s personal history and wish at times to know more. Why he has come to be who he is, someone who speaks little and savors his solitude? He seems indifferent to current events, notably Japanese history or politics; he never reads a newspaper or listens to the news. At times it as if he were a version of Rip Van Winkle who has been sleeping while the world turns.
This focus on what is happening in the moment to both Höss and Hirayama is what ties these two films together, but The Zone of Interest demands that we contextualize the “now” historically, while Perfect Days allows viewers the leisure of enjoying every frame, recalling the play of light in the canopy of trees that so fascinates Hirayama.
Daniel R. Schwarz is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences. He is The Cornell Daily Sun’s 2023-2024 visiting columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
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