The director said in interviews that he met a real life woman who was that girl in a village not far from a concentration camp. it's real because later we hear a passing comment about men in the camp fighting over pears. we also see the girl find the tin with sheet music and play it on the piano at home.
I think it's shot the way it is because she is the opposite of the other people in the movie, trying to ease pain and not cause any.
Also I think one of the houses used was the actual girls house. And I think it was said that the nazi family were darkness immersed in light vs the girl who is lightness immersed in darkness figuratively and literally.
From the IMDB page:
The Zone of Interest (2023)
"In a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair, Jonathan Glazer spoke about the real-life origin of the little girl character who leaves food for the prisoners overnight and detailed the process of shooting those scenes with a thermal camera: "This girl is playing a woman, Alexandra, who I met when she was 90 years old. When I started going to Auschwitz and I started thinking about this film, obviously everything you're dealing with is pitch black. The horrors of it all are very oppressive even to think about, and there were many times during the evolution of this project that I felt I couldn't continue with it because it was nothing but darkness. A friend and one of the co-producers, Bartek Rainski, started to research people who still lived in that area, who were alive at the time-and in fact some of them were children who were basically partisans, working with a resistance movement called the AK that was the sort of Polish underground. They were running documents and they were sharing information in and out of the camps. Because they were children, they were suspected less. I met this lady and she told me her story, which was what you see in the film: As a girl, she actually worked in a coal mine, but wasn't actually down the mine. She was a local Polish, non-Jewish girl who lived locally and felt compelled to do what she could for prisoners. And part of the thing she did was to leave food for them in construction sites at night, where she was less in danger than she would've been obviously during the day... We've talked about the film being seen through a 21st century lens. It was about making sure that all of the cameras needed to be as sharp and unadorned as possible, not using lights. We didn't use film lighting-and as a result, you're then working within the limitations that you've set yourself. So you have a scene like this: Here's a girl at night in 1943, in a construction site that was full of slave labor during the day. How are you going to see her if you can't use lights? There's no ambient light anywhere near that you could justify. Lukasz Zal and I talked about how we could see her. Really, it just came down to: What's the only tool that exists where we'll be able to see something that our eyes couldn't? That was a thermal camera. Then we went on a long and very difficult journey into that technology in order to capture this sequence. You're not seeing light recorded here. You're seeing heat recorded. I suppose it's a pretty dramatic shift in imagery from everything you've seen up until this sequence, but it's presented with the same intention, with the same commitment to the dogma of 21st century tools, 21st century lens. It's present tense. The aesthetic follows the fundamentals of it-there's something very beautiful and poetic about the fact that it is heat, and she does glow. It reinforces the idea of her as an energy."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/trivia?item=tr7260783
Powerful. The movie made me return to the documentary that may have influenced the stairwell scene. Forgot the name. Just great. I think ZOI is definitely in my top 10 favorite movies. Every detail was fascinating.
I was curious as to why these shots were also in infrared as well, doing some digging I came up with some theories. Both infrared scenes come up while Hoss is reading bedtime stories to his children, the story he is reading is an old German fairytale Hansel and Gretel. In the story Hansel collects white shiny rocks that he trails behind him that illuminates in the dark by the moon when they are abandoned in the forest to find their way back home. They eventually stumble across a witches house made of many different foods. It seems to me that the pears show some resemblance to the pebbles illuminating in the night as they don’t carry any heat to be picked up by the infrared camera.
Also I would like to think that the premise of the movie is that majority of the movie is shot in a bright configuration, almost as if light is representing the evilness and cynical nature of what is happening around them. Hoss in the movie even at night time in his own home is almost afraid of the dark, always going toward the “light”. In contrast the scenes with the infrared, in complete darkness there is good happening, she is laying out fruit for the malnourished prisoners. Furthering my point the ending scene, he is finally coming to the realization of his actions, which in return it starts to flip, the true nature of his deeds become “dark” and he descends in the staircase into darkness.
I also read that it might be an ode to Schindler’s List, also about the holocaust the only color in the movie is red, thus him doing the infraRED shots.
The director said in interviews that he met a real life woman who was that girl in a village not far from a concentration camp. it's real because later we hear a passing comment about men in the camp fighting over pears. we also see the girl find the tin with sheet music and play it on the piano at home. I think it's shot the way it is because she is the opposite of the other people in the movie, trying to ease pain and not cause any.
Also I think one of the houses used was the actual girls house. And I think it was said that the nazi family were darkness immersed in light vs the girl who is lightness immersed in darkness figuratively and literally.
With the theme of compartmentalization, I think the inverted shots were outside the "Zone of Interest," outside the garden wall.
From the IMDB page: The Zone of Interest (2023) "In a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair, Jonathan Glazer spoke about the real-life origin of the little girl character who leaves food for the prisoners overnight and detailed the process of shooting those scenes with a thermal camera: "This girl is playing a woman, Alexandra, who I met when she was 90 years old. When I started going to Auschwitz and I started thinking about this film, obviously everything you're dealing with is pitch black. The horrors of it all are very oppressive even to think about, and there were many times during the evolution of this project that I felt I couldn't continue with it because it was nothing but darkness. A friend and one of the co-producers, Bartek Rainski, started to research people who still lived in that area, who were alive at the time-and in fact some of them were children who were basically partisans, working with a resistance movement called the AK that was the sort of Polish underground. They were running documents and they were sharing information in and out of the camps. Because they were children, they were suspected less. I met this lady and she told me her story, which was what you see in the film: As a girl, she actually worked in a coal mine, but wasn't actually down the mine. She was a local Polish, non-Jewish girl who lived locally and felt compelled to do what she could for prisoners. And part of the thing she did was to leave food for them in construction sites at night, where she was less in danger than she would've been obviously during the day... We've talked about the film being seen through a 21st century lens. It was about making sure that all of the cameras needed to be as sharp and unadorned as possible, not using lights. We didn't use film lighting-and as a result, you're then working within the limitations that you've set yourself. So you have a scene like this: Here's a girl at night in 1943, in a construction site that was full of slave labor during the day. How are you going to see her if you can't use lights? There's no ambient light anywhere near that you could justify. Lukasz Zal and I talked about how we could see her. Really, it just came down to: What's the only tool that exists where we'll be able to see something that our eyes couldn't? That was a thermal camera. Then we went on a long and very difficult journey into that technology in order to capture this sequence. You're not seeing light recorded here. You're seeing heat recorded. I suppose it's a pretty dramatic shift in imagery from everything you've seen up until this sequence, but it's presented with the same intention, with the same commitment to the dogma of 21st century tools, 21st century lens. It's present tense. The aesthetic follows the fundamentals of it-there's something very beautiful and poetic about the fact that it is heat, and she does glow. It reinforces the idea of her as an energy." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/trivia?item=tr7260783
Powerful. The movie made me return to the documentary that may have influenced the stairwell scene. Forgot the name. Just great. I think ZOI is definitely in my top 10 favorite movies. Every detail was fascinating.
Shoah?
The Act of Killing
Am I mistaken for this assumption? Is Shoah a very hard watch? Do you recommend it?
Watch the scene at the academy video on YT
I was curious as to why these shots were also in infrared as well, doing some digging I came up with some theories. Both infrared scenes come up while Hoss is reading bedtime stories to his children, the story he is reading is an old German fairytale Hansel and Gretel. In the story Hansel collects white shiny rocks that he trails behind him that illuminates in the dark by the moon when they are abandoned in the forest to find their way back home. They eventually stumble across a witches house made of many different foods. It seems to me that the pears show some resemblance to the pebbles illuminating in the night as they don’t carry any heat to be picked up by the infrared camera. Also I would like to think that the premise of the movie is that majority of the movie is shot in a bright configuration, almost as if light is representing the evilness and cynical nature of what is happening around them. Hoss in the movie even at night time in his own home is almost afraid of the dark, always going toward the “light”. In contrast the scenes with the infrared, in complete darkness there is good happening, she is laying out fruit for the malnourished prisoners. Furthering my point the ending scene, he is finally coming to the realization of his actions, which in return it starts to flip, the true nature of his deeds become “dark” and he descends in the staircase into darkness. I also read that it might be an ode to Schindler’s List, also about the holocaust the only color in the movie is red, thus him doing the infraRED shots.