Course

FYH-101A-01

Document Type

Student Paper

Publication Date

Spring 2025

Disciplines

Anthropology | Film and Media Studies

Description, Abstract, or Artist's Statement

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a radical interrogation of complicity, silence, and the carefully curated distance that enables atrocity to unfold in full view. Through a cinematic language defined by absence - of violence, of sentimentality, of conventional storytelling - Glazer collapses the walls between the viewer and the horror we are trained to ignore. The film’s haunting sound design, unflinching cinematography, and alienating formal strategies construct a domestic world nestled against a genocide, daring us to recognize our own proximity to suffering. By situating the Hoss family’s banal cruelty alongside the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the essay draws a throughline between historical and contemporary systems of dehumanization, implicating both media spectatorship and geopolitical apathy. It argues that Glazer’s refusal to aestheticize violence, his anthropological distance, and his subversion of cinematic grammar serve not just as artistic choices, but as moral interventions - teaching us how to listen, how to look, and, ultimately, how to confront. The Zone of Interest becomes not a film about the Holocaust, but about us - about the blindfolds we wear, the parties we throw, and the suffering we ignore. If we are not willing to break our silence, we will remain inmates in our own zones of interest.

Comments

2nd place winner, 2025