In Son of Saul, Hungarian director László Nemes is tasked with representing on film the horrors of working as a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Any film that takes the Holocaust as its subject matter raises a challenging question: What is the efficacy of representing the unrepresentable? Like any other artistic medium, a film can preserve the collective memory of catastrophic events with the hope that we might remember its victims and prevent its reoccurrence; such a film has the pedagogical role of teaching us about greater injustices. Even still, films that deal explicitly with the Holocaust must question the ethics and limitations of representing such an event. Surely, we remember historical events through representation, but representation can also be abhorrent, if only because the dead cannot defend themselves. How can film, a medium known for its visual realism, depict an unspeakable event that evades any realistic representation? A respectable film that represents the Holocaust must also acknowledge the failure of its own representation.

 

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah is a documentary that does not seek to visually represent any scenes from the Holocaust; instead, it documents the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, meanwhile, asks: To what degree do we allow a Holocaust film to be entertaining, or even funny? By not showing any acts of violence or cruelty in the concentration camp, the filmmakers reproduce the same game with the audience that main character and Father Guido plays with his son: We may need symbolic fictions like those that art presents to us in order to interpret and understand reality, but they can never directly show all of the world’s complexity. The young girl wearing the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List reminds the audience of the artificial nature of the film, and in doing so, articulates that a celluloid strip of film could never come close to representing the actual event of the Holocaust.

 

Having been the production of such a large entertainment company as Universal Pictures, Schindler’s List feels dishonest or impure. The studio may not have approved the film with the logic that the Holocaust will sell tickets, but it must have weighed profitability as a heavy variable considering the spectacular cost of the film’s production. International films such as Son of Saul are largely state-funded, made cheaply, and do not feel as suspect to the moral trappings of Hollywood. Son of Saul is a Holocaust film that urges us to consider the moral tension between ethics and aesthetics inherent in the act of artistic production. This tension is foregrounded in the film’s cinematographic style.  

 

Son of Saul mercifully disorients the viewer through its busy camera work. Despite the fact that the extremely shallow depth of field allows us to see only blurry figures in the background we still feel fully immersed in the environment. In the very first scene of the film we realize with creepy horror that we are inside the gas chambers. There is a weird effect of withdrawal and disturbing intimacy all at once. Saul may always be within arms reach of us and occupy most of the frame, but he never has our full attention. We are more interested in the dark labyrinth that he is forced to navigate. In this way the film removes many of the typical cinematic codes and narrative tropes that define Holocaust films: there is no love story, no montage of terrified families being rounded up, no birds-eye-view of ghettos and, perhaps most strikingly, no music. Instead, we are perpetually accompanied with the sound of clanging metal, buckling gears, the sweeping of blood, and the shoveling of coal (or ash). This is mass murder in the banal guise of a day's work.

 

On the narrative level, Son of Saul is about an imprisoned man rushing to provide his son a proper Jewish burial. We soon learn, however, that this boy is not Saul’s son. Throughout the film Saul endangers not only his unit but also obstructs their plans of escape, compelling us to question both his motives and his sanity. In the final scene of the film another boy appears in front of Saul. At first we do not know if he is envisioning a phantom or a real, live child. Saul’s ensuing smile is profoundly cryptic. The film’s ambivalent ending leaves us as an active participant, full of thought. According to critical theorist Jacques Rancière, pensive endings both “extends the action” and “puts every conclusion in suspense.” The kinds of questions that the film raises concerning religion, torture, and mourning will continue to exist outside of the theater in the mind of the viewer, fostering a kind of dialogue.

 

One of the larger questions that Saul’s mad quest provokes is: How do we go on knowing that we are being manipulated? Religion and culture assert that there is something more than bare life. Perhaps Saul is simply choosing religious duty over the duty imposed on him by the Nazis. Religion, in this case, is presented as the last bastion of respect. Only in religious tradition do we find symbolic activities that instate meaning to life. There is still the question of Saul’s imaginary familial relation to the boy. Perhaps Saul’s delusions are a product of the Nazi’s systemic torture. Forcing Saul, a Hungarian Jew, to aid in the dismemberment of his own culture creates a profound guilt and disrupts the way he organizes the world. He may very well begin to view the prisoners whom he is tasked to escort to their death as family members. 

 

Son of Saul’s original visual style is informed by Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of representation. “The image is not a duplicate of a thing,” he writes. “It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible.” It is this understanding of representation that makes Son of Saul unique as a Holocaust film. The background through most of the film is shockingly suspended, leaving us with a hallucinatory, psychotic experience that is at once intensely real yet at the same time uncannily withdrawn and unspeakable. Through muffled sounds and distorted images, Son of Saul succeeds in restoring not a full presence but a spectral intimacy to the event and the suffering it engendered. 

 

Both the “son” of Saul and the film Son of Saul ought to be interpreted as constructive fictions. One is a corpse that will inspire a character’s ensuing actions; the other is the first piece of a Director’s corpus that will inform our collective memory of a historical event. As Saul does with the child's corpse, we should take László Nemes’ debut feature film as an opportunity to respect and mourn the dead.