How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

 

 "Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.

“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said — in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”

The goal was an immersive naturalism, and Glazer went to great lengths pursuing it. By using multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously throughout the house, he gave his actors an extraordinary freedom to improvise; they were often unaware if the cameras were even rolling. Glazer remained outside, holed up in a shipping container decked out with monitors. “Cinema is at odds with atrocity,” he said, explaining his approach. “As soon as you put a camera on someone, as soon as you light them, or make a decision about what lens to use, you’re glamorizing them.” Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, arrived early to the shoot and made some initial studies of the house. Glazer told him they were “too beautiful.” He wanted the images to seem “authorless.”"

read more in the article by GILES HARVEY 

How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust? – DNyuz