Auschwitz

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Selfies have become the modern day equivalent of postcards, a way to share our travel experiences with family and friends on social media. It's one thing to strike a goofy pose and snap a photo for Instagram on a beach or town square, but what if you are visiting a Holocaust memorial site? Taking fun, playful, even…

In King Lear, confronted with the figure of his cruelly blinded father, Edgar wonders whether matters are as bad as they imaginably could be. He concludes, however, that “the worst is not/So long as we can say “This is the worst.”’ The very fact that he has language, and the capacity for judgment, is itself proof that he has more to lose. Edgar’s words, in this most archaic of Shakespeare’s plays, feel horribly prophetic of the slaughter bench of modern history, as if the events of the 20th century were designed to test…

Before you read on, a word of caution. There are some films – many of them – that impress on a first viewing but which start to trickle away, like a handful of sand, the moment you leave the cinema. Then there are others, far fewer in number, that strike like a lightning bolt on a first watch and stay with you, scarring themselves into your psyche and subtly but permanently shifting your movie-viewing paradigm on its axis. Jonathan Glazer’s masterful and chilling The Zone of Interest fell into the second group for me. I…

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world,…

In 2018, Keren Blankfeld was interviewing David Wisnia for a project on wartime refugees to the US. But when she had already got up and was about to leave, he mentioned that he had had a girlfriend in Auschwitz. So she sat right down again and began work on this recreation of their paradoxical romance.Born in Warsaw in 1926, Wisnia had hoped to become a professional singer before his family was killed by the Nazis and he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Even there, his singing skills were appreciated by his captors and…

A dramedy that chronicles a tour of the Holocaust? Wait a minute, does that ring a bell? Nitesh Tiwari's Bawaal with its disastrous use of Auschwitz as a metaphor for relationship issues immediately comes to mind. None of that embarrassment occurs in A Real Pain, the new film by actor-director Jesse Eisenberg, which marked its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year. For all its playfulness and humour, A Real Pain strikes an intimate balance between the horrifying history of the Holocaust and the…

Elon Musk, who has been accused of allowing antisemitic messages on his social media platform, X, visited the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Monday, saying afterwards that the tragedy of the Holocaust "hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person."Musk toured the most notorious extermination camp established by Nazi Germany during World War II before attending a conference on antisemitism organized by the European Jewish Association in the nearby Polish city of Krakow.Elevate Your Tech Prowess…

Christian Friedel was overcome with shame. Days before playing Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, in Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, the German actor chose to visit Auschwitz for the first time. And since he’d already been given an undercut, Friedel had to tuck his Nazi hairdo underneath a baseball cap whilst touring the site where his character oversaw the extermination of 1.1 million Jews. “I was ashamed with this haircut,” Friedel tells Rolling Stone. “It was schizophrenic,…

Jonathan Glazer was, by his own admission, a little lost. The writer-director behind Sexy Beast and Under the Skin had been chasing an unformed idea for a movie for years, uncertain of where he would go with the story or what he wanted to say about the subject. “It wasn’t even an idea, really,” the filmmaker says, thinking back on the staggering amount of reading and research that took up the better part of his 2010s, as he sat in a small restaurant booth in New York. “It was more of a feeling. I was chasing a feeling.”…

Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and scenarios, conventions and clichés immediately spring to mind. Some of these feature films have been extraordinary. Several have been borderline exploitative. A few have been outright offensive. German philosopher Theodor Adorno is…