Nemes thus relies on suggestion: a blurry pile of limbs, coal being thrown into burning fires, patches of blood, and piles of ash. These strategies suggest realism, but Son of Saul frames its character entirely in shallow focus, meaning we are privy to very little in terms of what is happening beyond Saul’s perspective. A Nazi soldier grabs Saul and forces him to hold back the door as the screams from behind it slowly fade away. In the first shot, Saul enters the frame as he helps a group of Jews onto a train, and then leads them straight into the gas chambers. Using elaborately staged long takes, the handheld camera bumps up and down with him in the center of an Academy-ratio 4:3 frame, limiting the character’s point of view. Nemes keeps the camera focused on Saul and his direct experience throughout. However, Saul steals the body of a young boy from the gas chambers, a boy who may or may not be his son, and searches for a rabbi to give the body a proper funeral. In essence, the film uses its visual ambiguity to make an argument for moral ambiguity, creating an intense experience but with a rather crude set of ethical quandaries.ĭirected by Hungarian László Nemes - a former assistant to Béla Tarr ( Sátántangó The Turin Horse) - the film follows Saul, a Sonderkommando member working through his daily routine of moving Jews into the gas chambers and exposing their remains to the Nazis. More damningly, the immediacy of its plot allows it to avoid historical consideration of the role of the Sonderkommando: Jews who were forced to work in the death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Belzec. But despite its setting, Son of Saul still shies away from depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, and, in doing so, creates a specious relationship between history and its representation. Its novelty has already earned it many accolades: the Grand Prix at Cannes, a number of Critics Awards, a Golden Globe, and surely Oscar gold in the Foreign Language Film category. Shot with intense close-ups and a booming soundtrack, Son of Saul sets its terse narrative right inside the gas chambers. So credit goes to Son of Saul, a real-time thriller set in Auschwitz, for locating its brutality up-front and center, as well as shying away from simplistic storytelling. The continuing respectability of Holocaust films has often resulted in disrespectful art.
Cue Kate Winslet on HBO’s Extras: “If you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar.” (She later won an Oscar for her Holocaust drama The Reader.) More frustrating, however, is that these films are largely risible affairs, tasteful dramas without much thematic or aesthetic ambition. Ever since the success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993, Holocaust films have emerged as their own genre, often with awards shows in mind. EVERY YEAR, one expects that the best films of the year will adhere to certain tired genre conventions: biopics of great artists, period romances, and of course, a Holocaust film or two.
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