MOVING TALE OF SURVIVAL
Hungarian drama Son Of Saul presents the bleak journey of a man trying to find humanity within the horrors of the Holocaust
IT’S October 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination.
While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son.
As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.
The harrowing 107-minute film from 2015 has garnered a string of awards, including an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
It represents the directorial debut of Hungary-born LászlóNemes, who grew up in Paris.
The son of a stage director and a professor, Nemes studied history, international relations and screenwriting, before working as an assistant director in France and Hungary on short and feature films.
He has worked as Hungarian art film director Béla Tarr’s assistant during the filming of The Man From London (2007).
Surrounded by a small, loyal and close-knit team, Nemes spent the last five years bringing Son Of Saul to fruition.
Below he talks about the poignant film.
The idea for Son Of Saul.
While making The Man From London in Bastia, France the shoot was interrupted for a week and in a bookstore, I found a book of eyewitness accounts published by the Shoah Memorial called Des Voix sous la cendre (Voices From Beneath The Ashes), also known as “The Scrolls Of Auschwitz.”
It was written by former Sonderkommando members from the extermination camps, who had buried their written testimonies before the rebellion in 1944. The actual documents were found years later.
They describe their daily tasks, how the work was organised, the rules by which the camp was run and Jews exterminated, as well as how they put together a certain form of resistance.
Who were the Sonderkommando? They were prisoners chosen by the SS to escort new transports of prisoners to the gas chamber buildings, to get them to undress, reassure them and lead them into the gas chambers. After, they would remove and burn the corpses, all the while cleaning the space.
And it all had to be accomplished very quickly because other prisoner convoys were already on the way. Auschwitz-Birkenau functioned like a factory producing and eliminating corpses on an industrial scale. In the summer of 1944, it was running at full capacity: historians estimate that several thousand Jews were killed there every day.
During the course of their mission, the Sonderkommandos were given preferential treatment. They were allowed to take food found in the transports and, within the confines of their perimeter, had relative freedom of movement.
But the task they were assigned was grueling and they were regularly eliminated every three or four months by the SS in order to ensure that there were no witnesses to the extermination.
Why did you choose to use the Sonderkommando accounts?
I have always found movies about the camps frustrating. They attempt to build stories of survival and heroism, but in my mind they are in fact recreating a mythical conception of the past. The Sonderkommando accounts are on the contrary concrete, present and tangible.
They precisely describe, in the here and now, the “normal” functioning of a death factory, with its organisation, its rules, work cadences, shifts, hazards, and its maximum productivity. In fact, the SS used the word “Stück” (parts) when speaking about corpses. Corpses were produced in that factory. These accounts allowed me to see it all through the eyes of the extermination camps’ damned.
Did you forbid yourself anything?
I didn’t want to have to show the face of horror openly, or to recreate the atrocity by going into the gas chambers while people were dying. The film strictly follows Saul’s movements. So we stop at the door of the gas chamber and enter only after the extermination in order to remove the bodies and wash away any traces of what occurred there in preparation for the next group.
These missing images are those of death; images that can’t be reconstructed, and shouldn’t be touched or manipulated. Because it is important for me to stay with Saul’s point of view.
How did you film it?
Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, production designer László Rajk and I decided early on that we’d stick to the dogma that “the film cannot look beautiful or appealing”, “we cannot make a horror film” and “staying with Saul means not going beyond his own field of vision, hearing, and presence.”
We also wanted to use traditional 35mm film and photochemical processing at every stage to maintain a certain instability in the images and an organic feel.
The challenge was to strike an emotional chord in the audience — something that digital doesn’t allow for.
All of this implied a lighting technique that was diffused, industrial and as simple as possible. It also required filming with the same lens, a 40mm, a restricted aspect ratio, and not something like scope which widens one’s field of vision. We had to always remain at the character’s eye level and stay with him.
Saul wears a jacket with a big red cross on the back.
Yes, it’s a target. The SS used it to make it easier to shoot men who tried to escape. For us, it was a visual target for the camera.
Sound plays an important role in the film.
The sound designer, Tamás Zányi, who has worked on all my films, and I decided to work on a sound that was very simple, raw and yet quite complex and multidimensional.
One has to be aware of the very particular sound atmosphere of these hellish factories. The multiplicity of tasks being accomplished, shouted orders, screams, and many languages were all intermingling.
Sound can superimpose over the image, at times even taking its place.
Who plays Saul?
Géza Röhrig isn’t an actor, but a Hungarian writer and poet who lives in New York. I met him several years ago.
He came to mind for the role probably because he is someone who is in constant motion, his facial features and his body are always changing.
It’s impossible to tell his age, for he is
at once old and young, but also handsome and ugly; ordinary and remarkable, deep and impassive, quick-witted and slow.
This character and your film endeavour to contrast a death ceremony with the death factory, rites with machinery, prayer with noise.
When there is no longer any hope, from the deepest part of this hell, Saul’s inner voice says to him: you must survive in order to accomplish an act that bears meaning, a human, age-old, sacred meaning.
It’s a meaningful act that is at the very origin of the community of mankind and religions: paying respect to the body of the dead.