Our invited keynote speaker will be Jaime Pena (Filmoteca de Galicia), presenting A Home in Hell: The Representation of Auschwitz in Jonathan Glazer’s 'The Zone of Interest'
ABSTRACT
Auschwitz and the extermination camps of the Second World War have always been a problem of representation, at least since as early as 1945. From any perspective, philosophical or artistic; also for film. In fact, it can be said that cinema did not know how to represent Auschwitz until 1985, when Claude Lanzmann completed his documentary ‘Shoah’. Since then, once the “Lanzmann formula” (the place and the word) was established, there have been many attempts to return to Auschwitz, to find an ethical and aesthetic model that would make possible the representation of extermination in its most extreme manifestation: the disappearance of bodies, the absence of any trace. One of the most recent examples is ‘The Zone of Interest’, the film by Jonathan Glazer that adapts the novel of the same title by Martin Amis. We can therefore see ‘The Zone of Interest’ from two points of view: first, as an adaptation of a novel about Auschwitz; later, as a radical proposal that moves away from traditional cinematic fiction and approaches conceptual art. From the initial black screen, the only possible representation for Glazer is one that puts the conceptual aspect before its dramatization. ‘The Zone of Interest’ is to Auschwitz what ‘D’est’ (Chantal Akerman, 1993) or ‘I Had Nowhere to Go: A Portrait of a Displaced Person’ (Douglas Gordon, 2016) are to deportation.
Jaime Pena is programmer at the Filmoteca de Galicia, member of the Editorial Board of the monthly journal 'Caimán Cuadernos del Cine' (former 'Cahiers du Cinéma España') and usual collaborator of the Argentinian revue 'El Amante'. Author of 'El espíritu de la colmena' (2004), and 'Cine español. Otro trayecto histórico' (2005, together with Jose Luis Castro de Paz), and 'El cine después de Auschwitz. Representaciones de la ausencia en el cine moderno y contemporáneo' (2020).
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