The movie Area of interest has become a source of attention due to its Oscar nomination for best film of the year 2024. But there are no shortage of reasons. This cold, direct and cruel exploration of evil and the human capacity for violence is a chilling and well-directed tale. Especially because it uses all the resources at its disposal to narrate its premise. Namely: the life of the family of Nazi commander Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) who passed in apparent normality next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
For a similar work, the director used the visual section to create an immersive sensation in the lives of his characters. For this, he used night scenes filmed with the so-called American night technique, which consists of recording during the day and darkening the shot with a filter. Also, groups of cameras that filmed the same sequence simultaneously.
The combination gives the film an austere air that focuses on the analysis of human action in the face of violence. In particular, the way in which Nazi cruelty managed to denature the sense of ethical limits to unprecedented levels. To explain something similar on screen, Glazer and his team spent time analyzing a basic question. How did he perceive an educated and fanatical German family? under the ideals of the Third Reich, the barbaric methods of violence used by those in power.
Many eyes on the same place
In a interview for Vanity Fair, the director explained that one of his concerns regarding the plot was how to prevent the cinematic image from embellishing the horror. For Jonathan Glazer, cinema can ennoble and empower all kinds of topics. So his vision of the Höss family must have been far from that. To the extent that it was a frontal observation of how the members They could cancel out any empathy for the atrocities that were happening meters away, to continue their routine.
The director and director of photography, Łukasz Żal and the film team, surrounded the set house with ten cameras working at the same time. Therefore, any lighting, set design and cinematography techniques had to be relegated to a harsh contemplation of the characters. “We didn’t want any artifice in the shots,” Glazer explained. For that, the cameras worked alone, while the production team left. During the recording of the scenes, the actors were allowed to act without direction and stick as closely as possible to the script. All with the aim of making a single take that could not be repeated. After all, each scene took place for hours in 360 degrees, so repetition could mean a bigger problem.
“The cameras needed to record everything simultaneously so we never had to move a camera and repeat the same action. We would capture all of our angles at once to achieve that sense of present time.”
Jonathan Glazer
Which resulted in the feeling of observing the family’s life from their anodyne everyday life. Which also allowed us to turn that frugality into a message. You can survive even knowing the horrors that can occur very close by.
In the gloomy Höss garden
Another of the most impressive parts of the film is the one that concerns both the night shots and the point-by-point recreation of historical images. In the first case, Glazer used the American night technique, which consists of recording during the day and darkening the resulting image in editing using polarization.
In Area of interest, the feeling is that there is a continuous look at what happens outside and inside the concentration camp. Which means that it does not adhere to the time of day. Also, which involves the idea of observation, continues in parallel. Something that gives the sensation of simultaneous events both within the family home and in the building beyond.
In the case of the shots themselves, Łukasz Żal avoided composing in an artistic or aesthetic way. According to his words in Vanity Fair “He tried to be as objective as possible,” so the images have the appearance of a family album. It is not at all coincidental. For the production team, reconstructing the images that are part of the public domain was telling a story through the visual realm. In fact, the expert imitated lighting and framing errors to narrate what was happening from the position of an impassive observer.
The use of thermal technology in cinema
In one of the toughest and most uncomfortable scenes in the film, Rudolph is shown reading a story to his children. Gradually, the sequence transitions to another showing a young woman acting secretly during the night. As strange as it may seem and given how careful the film team was with resources, the entire action takes place through nighttime thermal imaging. Which, in principle, shows what happens as a dream event, until it shows that it is a woman trying to help the captives in the concentration camp.
In reality, the entire fragment is related to the director’s point of view on good and evil. The woman, who can be seen, advances in a white and grayish impression in front of the screen, embodies the determination of those who surrounded the field to provide support. The appearance of gloomy coldness of the entire sequence has a reason. The cinematographer used a FLIR camera, capable of recording infrared thermographic images. But it is not a tool made for cinema, so it had to be work with digital software to standardize the result with the rest of the tape.
In the end, what is shown is an image that is diluted in the midst of shadows and that is sustained in a night full of shades of gray. An allegorical vision of the central premise of the film based on the perception of evil as a hidden part of every human action.