the controversial Auschwitz film SON OF SAUL

Garnered tons of awards, a technical tour de force, Cannes and likely (?) Oscar winner... and called "radically dehistoricized" and "intellectually repellent" by Manohla Dargis in the NY Times.

Todd Solondz:

It's kind of like if the Dardennes remade "Weekend at Bernie's." But you know it's impressive, how they were able to cinematically [and] conceptually achieve that.

Me, I'm in the middle. Much to admire, some to regret.

Reading the wiki, idgi whats the controversy

one is he focused on an individual Freudian psychodrama rather than the breadth of the Finalk Solution.

They were talking about this on the radio last week and the host goes "I think we have a clip." Then they play about a minute or two of the movie ... in Hungarian. That'd be like saying they had a clip of the new Star Wars and then playing a minute of robot sounds and laser guns going pew-pew.

i don't watch holocaust films anymore bc they're too upsetting and this sounds like the motherlode of upsetting holocaust movies

That'd be like saying they had a clip of the new Star Wars and then playing a minute of robot sounds and laser guns going pew-pew.

sounds p representative.

no thread safe from SW bullshit apparently.

Nemes conceived of the film from the book The Scrolls of Auschwitz, a collection of testimonies by Sonderkommando members, after discovering it during the production of Béla Tarr's The Man from London in 2005 when he was working as Tarr's assistant.[2][13]

Holocaust film dir. by Bela Tarr is a frightening vision.

Anyway, lets blame this fiasco on him now he's retired.

One of the very best films of last year, one of the most thoughtful statements of any kind last year. A major achievement.

i don't watch holocaust films anymore bc they're too upsetting

I kinda feel this way too. Being exposed to so many as a youth has made me just feel like urgh enough I get it

the best are probably Shoah and The Pianist fwiw

+ Night and Fog

Shoah is the one, for sure. I never finished the Pianist.

This is where I go completely overboard, but to me it's 1) Shoah 2) Night and Fog 3) Son of Saul...

Sorry, I really think this film is great. I almost wrote 'love' this film, but of course that's wrong. It's just kept me thinking for months.

the pianist is devastating imo, just the emptiness of the film alone is rough. and the parting of brody and his sister.

my wife can't watch these movies either.

I've never seen but I know someone who was in it.

the whole film-crit "the shoah is the /best/ holocaust movie ever made, bro!" thing gives me chills.

and yeah personally i don't care to see another film on this subject again.

though the pianist is quite remarkable.

as is diamonds of the night.

don't call me bro

"dude, that movie is /totally/ modernist! structuring absences, man!"

i kid

Have just seen it for a second time. I don't get you guys, it's so obviously a masterpiece.

I missed my chance to catch this in Leeds back in November and since reading some reviews and watching some clips I really want to see it.

There's a moment in the film, where the camera holds on a doorway, and this one person pops his head into the doorway, and then stands outside it, and it must be a downhill slope or something, or the camera is on tilt, I did not get what happened, but all of a sudden I thought 'wait, is that guy levitating?', and as I looked at it, yeah, it's obviously been carefully composed to seem as if he's levitating. The whole film is filled with small moments like that.

After the screening I had some time to spend, so I went to the cinema café to buy a cup of coffee, and the barista's were both: 'so, what's it like to have seen that film? How does one feel afterwards?' And yeah, I was shaken, again, it's an incredibly tough sit. But, I mean, it's a masterpiece, I don't get how anyone can claim otherwise.

I was just watching an interview with Nemes and Rohrig, it would be easy to assume that the latter was the director as he is a lot more articulate. He said Lanzmann was at it's 2nd screening and gave it his unconditional approval. He also made a comment about only lasting 3 minutes into Tim Blake Nelson's godawful, widescreen but non-controversial holocaust movie The Grey Zone.

I want to see this even more now but Yorkshire is so fucking shit for cinemas. I'm guessing it will be out on DVD/VOD/torrents by April:(

Peter Labuza:

Son of Saul ... visually simplifies the moral judgments that other Holocaust texts have sought to complicate. Levi claimed the Sonderkommando lived in a “Gray Zone,” somewhere between both victim and perpetrator. Here, Nemes casts them as pawns. While individual characters are given differing degrees of complicity, the role of the Nazis here is ultimately as a force of indescribable evil. Saul simply follows orders at every moment, and remains absent of any interiority during these sequences. Just as the shallow focus of the camera erases anything beyond our immediate understanding of Saul, Nemes’s narrative erases agency by never once having Saul articulate his own work.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/shallow-depth-son-of-saul-shows-nothing-and-says-nothing

I have problems with the film (touched on in the Detrius thread), but Labuza's issues (on the whole) aren't them.

Stupid text. No sense of the sound - keeps talking about the film being 'visually' this and that, as if you can divorce the image from the sound in this film. And basically mad that the film isn't more condemning of the Sonderkommando's, which, step away from the Primo Levi.

I watched Son of Saul last night and found it very powerful and daunting, to the point I didn't sleep well afterwards. Even though it is a narrow screen movie there is so much sensory overload by the use of suggestion and audio that at some parts I was getting distracted by what was happening off camera, as vivid as they make it.

I am not with some of the negative criticism. A morally simplistic portrayal of the Sonderkommandos wouldn't have worked, as wouldn't a quiet killing facility with nothing happening. It was horrific but not gratuitous imo.

i found this easier to admire as a formal achievement, than an emotionally affecting film.

it has a sensory impact, without going for the jugular, which i appreciate as it could so easily have gone that route, but the director's determination to make this a conceptual filmmaking exercise made it feel limited.

def impressive as a directorial debut, but its insistence on so remaining within its limited viewpoint made it a bit draining/hard to really engage with.

maybe its just that the actor didnt have much scope beyond a weird sort of inscrutability, which started off as highly interesting, but then just seemed a bit rigid.

im sure someone will explain that i am simply not cine-smart enough to understand the brilliance of this film, but to me, its a film about a subject that should prize the subject, but instead prized formalism above all else.

actually i would say the film has that particular kind of arthouse laziness, where for the sake of aesthetic consistency, it doesnt really interrogate its themes/subject, it keeps it almost at a remove. all very 'brave' and everything, but also just a bit too easy in a sense.

Well, I love this film, and keeps defending it over and over, but I really don't get what you're saying. This film gave me small anxiety attacks both times I saw it, so I'd call it emotionally affecting in the extreme.

what in it made you anxious? are you sure you werent just excited (you seem to marvel at certain shots more than anything else in your post upthread) at the direction?

First time it was the look the kapo gave Saul when he's asked to list 75 workers he 'won't need' anymore. The combination of guilt, shame, and fear of being told on, the implications of murder and torment. The second time it was where I suspect it comes to most: The screams from behind the door in the opening scene.

My interpretation of the Saul character was that he wasn't inscrutable, he had been stripped of his humanity + ego and been party to daily genocide for weeks or possibly months, and all that remained was a fading little pulse of his survival instincts and a fading memory of when he was a human being. I thought it was a brilliant and credible performance and especially from a non-professional actor.

Very good film. It was an odd mish-mash of lots of offscreen violence (more arthouse tactic) and the camera movement that's very common to a more mainstream film.

Again - the "limited viewpoint" for me is what is needed; I like it made a fiction within the vastness of the Holocaust as a topic. That aestheticizing of it is rarely attempted - its often documentary or a mix of the saccharine.

This novel has been translated into English for the first time and its perhaps along similar lines: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/joshua-cohen/the-crematorium-is-a-zoo

actually i would say the film has that particular kind of arthouse laziness, where for the sake of aesthetic consistency, it doesnt really interrogate its themes/subject, it keeps it almost at a remove. all very 'brave' and everything, but also just a bit too easy in a sense.

― StillAdvance, Thursday, 12 May 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Brave, brave criticisms here

I thought it was a brilliant and unforgettable movie. Lanzmann gave it his blessing and described it as an “anti-Schindler’s List” movie, which is something that was needed imo.

Its better than that - really mapping out a path for more types of potential fiction(s). None of this Poetry can't be written... guff and that might what's going back to.

I meant as in someone like Lanzmann backing the movie, but yeah I agree - it's approach was quite startling and deserves credit.

Harrowing. Marvelous sound design.