“I didn’t want to make a film with a distant, detached point of view,” says its director, László Nemes. Now, Son of Saul is poised to join the long list of Holocaust-related dramas the Academy has feted, including The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Shop on Main Street (1966), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002), The Reader (2008), and Ida (2014).īut it would be a mistake to simply categorize Son of Saul (originally titled Saul fia) as yet another award-worthy Holocaust film in a critical but some might say fatigued genre. Son of Saul could be seen as an effort to unshackle cinema from the traditional Holocaust narrative and, in turn, capture the core of the 20th century’s greatest atrocity. In this sense, Nemes’ method challenges the cinematic representations of the Holocaust, which, beyond the austere, unflinching eye, is the picture’s greatest strength.Licorice Pizza Is a Tragicomic Tale of 1970s Hollywood David Sims
In eschewing this approach, Nemes is able to locate the harrowing essence of the Holocaust – the degradation and destruction of human beings.
More broadly, the Holocaust movie as a genre is about reconciling the personal with the historical, seeking understanding by projecting small stories against the wider sociopolitical narrative. In taking the subjectivity a step further, Son of Saul appropriates the experience of one man to find the crux of a historical moment which, in its scale and cruelty, still seems beyond comprehension. It is a great war film because it finds enduring truth in everyday minutiae. Fuller’s film, which carries the weight of anecdote, acts as a filter for the haze of his and star Lee Marvin’s own memories of war. Both pictures confront the enormity of history by focusing on the day-to-day lives of their protagonists. Nemes strips the role of the Sonderkommando from its complex historical context his cinema is one of physical force and powerful mythical imagery.Īs a subjective document of war, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One from 1980 serves as an interesting comparison piece. They are the conduits between the living and the dead, and they bear the burden of watching their people die. They usher their brethren through the chambers to Hades. Similarly, the Sonderkommando are men in purgatory, carrying out the devil’s business. The idea of seeking a burial for a loved one, for example, comes from the Greek myth Antigone. As the turbulence hits you on a physical and emotional level, Nemes pierces through the clamour by giving the story a mythical bent. The notion of the burial – and the difficult tasks required to fulfil it – is what carries us through the maelstrom. Read our exclusive interview with director László Nemes The audience is pummelled by the violence off camera, but Saul is our witness.
It is like being embalmed in a nightmare, engulfed in a fog of obscured horror. The sound design is nauseatingly effective, with the hellscape of the camp imposing itself as a cacophony of screams, barks and the distressing white noise of human suffering. The camera chains us to Saul, but the sheer chaos of the world around him is omnipresent. Indeed, stylistically, Son of Saul is calculated to stun. This central idea of the burial is the anchor in the tempest, offering a clear moral trajectory through myriad horrors which can often threaten to overwhelm it. It is an expression of atonement, devotion and defiance.
In a situation where death is ubiquitous, the act of burial is not only a humanising ritual standing at odds with the degradation of the Third Reich it connects Saul to his persecuted religion. Determined to give him a proper burial, he furtively sets out on a search for a rabbi to help carry out the deed. As he clears out the gas chamber with his fellow Sonderkommando one day at the end of 1944, Saul finds the corpse of a boy he believes to be his son.
Son of Saul by for #LWLiesWeekly Download the issue now at #design #illustration #cover #artwork #magazine #film #movie #cinema #sonofsaulĪ photo posted by Little White Lies on at 4:27am PDTĪt its core, Son of Saul is about the unwavering pursuit of a single act of decency in the face of overwhelming atrocity.