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Now with enhanced closed captioning (cc).
Warning: Spoilers
Hungarian Director László Nemes was wise to realize that traditional filmmaking was essentially inadequate when tackling a topic as vast, overwhelming and horrific as the Holocaust. His use of shallow focus throughout Son of Saul (Saul fia, in Hungarian) creates an urgency and intensity which immerses the viewer. The protagonist, Saul Ausländer, works in the sonderkommando, doing the really dirty work in the gas chambers and crematoria. After learning that a child somehow survived exposure to Zyklon B (only to be suffocated by a Nazi physician), Saul decides that somehow the child is his progeny and that he must find a rabbi to say the mourner’s kaddish and to help bury the boy in the ground. He will not let the body be incinerated.
In this film, shallow focus allows the viewer to really concentrate on Saul’s plight and to see how difficult it is for him to complete his quest to bury the child and have a rabbi say kaddish over the grave. The technique is remarkably effective in drawing our attention to what’s important on the screen (what’s in focus) and ignoring everything that is not. The view is so narrow that the viewer can’t ever be sure what will next confront Saul. At any moment, his world might change yet again. Nemes’ method of filmmaking, which draws the eye to key details, allow him to make a different sort of picture. The shallow focus embodies what life is like in the camp. Often, it intensifies our awareness of the intense suffering all around Saul.
Somehow, the less we see on the screen and the less we see in focus, the greater the director’s capability of recreating Auschwitz in our mind’s eye. We begin to sympathize with Saul and understand why he so desperately wishes that he could subvert the order of the concentration camp. As in the world before the camp, he wishes to reaffirm the sacrosanctness of life by mourning the death of a single child. The death of a million people in one place is impossible to fathom, whereas mourning the death of one person-whether a son or not-is something that everyone can understand.
0:00 Pre-Intro
0:10 Introduction
3:15 Life in the Sonderkommando
4:38 Shallow Focus
8:08 Sound
9:04 Nemes' Auschwitz
10:04 Reimagining Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone
13:06 Perspective
15:24 Renegade
16:15 Adonai
17:32 Oberkapo Mietek
18:01 Ella
19:40 Braun
24:12 The Forest
24:46 Everything Comes to Nothing
25:35 Who is Saul Ausländer?
26:49 Issues Raised
29:22 A Message of Hope
30:13 Outro
#sonofsaul #saulfia #LászlóNemes #Holocaustcinema #sonderkommando #GézaRöhrig #Auschwitz #HolocaustEducation #gaschambers. #crematorium
Негізгі бет Ойын-сауық Son of Saul (2015): The Holocaust in Shallow Focus
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