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It’s why German audiences have problems with this film: you cannot identify the evil character. “There’s no one guy for you to project the evil on to – it’s machinery that’s already in place,” he says. This focus on humanity’s capacity for evil is what separates Nemes’s film from other Holocaust narratives, forcing the viewer to understand that the atrocities at Auschwitz aren’t incongruities of history but merely one moment in the continuing chronicle of mankind’s proclivity for violence.
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I didn’t want to take the viewer into a world of fantasy, I wanted the viewer to have this sense of reality.” “It’s a crematorium, a simple factory designed to kill people on an industrial level. For Nemes it was imperative that the camp looked and felt man-made, from the grinding metal doors that imprisoned the victim’s blood-curdling screams, to the crunch of human bones and roar of the fire pits. Son of Saul presents the Holocaust as a conveyor belt of inhumanity. More from Film: Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda on Our Little Sister Why so serious? The death of comic relief in film This film had to be visceral and sound is there constantly to say much more than the image, it gives the mental image to the audience of the enormity of the context.” “I was there for the entire process of sound mixing, even picking which fire sounds from the library to use.
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“Sound was paramount and we worked on it extensively,” says Nemes. Shot in a square 1:37 aspect ratio to focus the attention on Saul rather than his surroundings, the film’s limited visual information leaves the soundtrack - and the viewer's imagination - to do the harrowing task of visualising the action outside the frame. To me space means something, it means something regarding the continuity of life, and I’m really interested in that – how space evolves and its relationship to time.” I’m interested in films that transport viewers into a space and time that the viewer can’t feel. “The organic quality of the film stems from my interest in cinema being an immersive experience. Nemes has been vocal in his desire for the film to be screened in 35mm. Cinema can be a very immersive art form and I wanted to grab the viewer and take them on that journey.” “I wanted to communicate this through the means of cinema. “I wanted to give the measure of the plight of one human being in a very visceral way,” Nemes says. Erdély keeps the camera close to Saul’s eye level throughout, providing a very limited perspective of the events surrounding him. The film follows a Hungarian Jewish prisoner named Saul, played by Géza Röhrig. This immediacy is achieved by Nemes and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, via their precise control over what the camera glimpses. It had to be raw.” The camera and Son of Saul “I wanted to have this immediate sense of reality, without all the projections of the post-war period the safe path established by Holocaust films with the coats, striped uniforms and all the iconography. “For me, films dealing with this subject tend to deal with it in a static way, presenting it from an outside perspective and I want to go into the inside,” he explains. Shoah documentarian Claude Lanzmann, famous for his disapproval of dramatised representations of the Holocaust, praised the film as the “anti- Schindler’s List.” For Nemes it was incredibly important to avoid the type of sentimental narrative that has become synonymous with the Holocaust. This level of intimacy may be why the number of people who have found Nemes’s depiction of Auschwitz legitimate far outweighs the naysayers. “This is the one that, although it only affected me in an indirect manner, it was very profound, as if the destruction of my family was already transmitted to me in my genes.” “It’s a tragedy I know in a very intimate way,” he says. When The Skinny sits down with Nemes to discuss the film, he explains his family’s connection to the Holocaust and his choice to represent humanity at its most desperate. Jean-Luc Godard famously stated that the reconstruction of the concentration camps for the sake of storytelling was an obscenity and a handful of critics have been disparaging of Nemes’s debut, with Manohla Dargis of the New York Times going as far as describing the film as “radically dehistoricised and intellectually repellent.”