Inner survival

  • 2015-11-04
  • By Michael Mustillo

RIGA - One of the highlights of this year’s Riga International Film Festival (RigaIFF) was “Son of Saul.”
It is a harrowing film, the first by Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.    
The film is simple and minimalist. Its approach creates a visceral experience. The Holocaust has been the subject matter of many films, but “Son of Saul” takes the viewer into the very heart of a Nazi death camp’s darkness, its brutality, its unimaginable charnel house horrors, in a way that few other films are able to do.

We experience it all through numerous close-ups, many shot from Saul’s first hand view, taking the viewer into a world where death has become part of daily reality, and where the simple act of burying a dead boy becomes an essential quest to hold on to what humanity remains.
“My movie is not about physical survival; it has always been about inner survival,” as Nemes describes in an interview with the film magazine Notebook. “What happens when there is no more hope?”

The film was set at Auschwitz, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. The filmmaker sets out a fictionalised account to bring alive in relatable, individual terms a story all too often told in statistics. The number of Hungarian Jews deported in a period of eight weeks numbered 430,000. 100,000 were children under the age of 18 who died in the gas chambers. These children never got a burial.

This year marked 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. At the commemoration in the camp this January, 300 Auschwitz survivors attended. As the Holocaust fades out of living memory, it is worth raising the question: should the Holocaust be allowed to fade into the past to let the wounds heal, or should society keep hold of it as a lesson for the future?

Nemes has a clear answer: “It’s an open wound and you can feel it,” he said in a recent interview. “People tend to say that it is just another story about the Holocaust; like another story about the Titanic, some kind of mythical thing. No, it’s not just another story. For us, it’s the present, not a myth. That motivated us to make it — we wanted to make it present.’’
Nemes holds back, however, in areas where some filmmakers have gone further in terms of more galling, graphic scenes. He gives the viewer a blurry impression of Saul’s four months labouring in the gas chamber.

Though Nemes has included the usual methods of brutalities inflicted within Nazi camps, any horrifying images and actions were always set in the backdrop of Saul’s individual struggle. They were never allowed to dominate the forefront of the screen. The atrocities are only caught at the periphery of the frame, only suggested in out-of-focus blurred and filtered imagines and diffused simple lighting, caught in the rawness of the noises, in the off-screen sounds – both hideous and terrifying.

By clinging to his quest to bury the body of a boy who he claims is his lost son, Saul “lost his ability to see the horror,” Nemes notes in the same interview, “no longer noticing the atrocities because he got used to it.”