Focusing on the everyday domesticity of the Auschwitz commandant’s family might only reflect the horror indirectly, but the film pulls the banality of evil into pin-sharp focus
A single, satanic joke burns through the celluloid in Jonathan Glazer’s technically brilliant, uneasy Holocaust movie, freely adapted by the director from the novel by Martin Amis, a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste.
How did the placidly respectable home life of the German people coexist with imagining and executing the horrors of the genocide? How did such evil flower within what George Steiner famously called the German world of “silent night, holy night, gemütlichkeit”?
The film imagines the pure bucolic bliss experienced by Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) who with his family lives in a handsomely appointed family home with servants just outside the barbed-wire-topped wall. His wife,...
A single, satanic joke burns through the celluloid in Jonathan Glazer’s technically brilliant, uneasy Holocaust movie, freely adapted by the director from the novel by Martin Amis, a film which for all its artistry is perhaps not entirely in control of its (intentional) bad taste.
How did the placidly respectable home life of the German people coexist with imagining and executing the horrors of the genocide? How did such evil flower within what George Steiner famously called the German world of “silent night, holy night, gemütlichkeit”?
The film imagines the pure bucolic bliss experienced by Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) who with his family lives in a handsomely appointed family home with servants just outside the barbed-wire-topped wall. His wife,...
- 5/19/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw in Cannes
- The Guardian - Film News
Tonight’s Schindler’s List retrospective event at the Tribeca Film Festival yielded more than a few familiar stories. But it also brimmed with unchecked emotion from director Steven Spielberg and four of his cast members, including Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley, who all watched the film with a theatrical audience for the first time in nearly 25 years.
Moments after the lights came up after the screening and a long ovation from the Beacon Theatre crowd had subsided, Spielberg said he last saw the film with a theatrical audience in 1993, when it had a series of European premieres. “There were so many moments that washed over me,” he said, his voice charged with emotion.
Asked by moderator Janet Maslin of The New York Times for his reaction to seeing it again, he said, “I watched the film and I was just …. proud. I’m very, very proud.” He later added...
Moments after the lights came up after the screening and a long ovation from the Beacon Theatre crowd had subsided, Spielberg said he last saw the film with a theatrical audience in 1993, when it had a series of European premieres. “There were so many moments that washed over me,” he said, his voice charged with emotion.
Asked by moderator Janet Maslin of The New York Times for his reaction to seeing it again, he said, “I watched the film and I was just …. proud. I’m very, very proud.” He later added...
- 4/27/2018
- by Dade Hayes
- Deadline Film + TV
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