Son of Saul (Sony, 2015) is a Holocaust film, but only in the way that it defies all other Holocaust films. To be more precise, it is not a Holocaust film in the way that we have come to know them previously. It is a radical disassembly of those films. It exchanges spectacle for the intimate and subjective. It denies facile redemption, but it does not refuse more complex or ambiguous versions of redemption. It flattens where it finds depth, and in this flattening, builds a new depth of field out of blurs. Son of Saul takes the familiar tropes of Holocaust cinema—long shots, long takes, perpetrator atrocities, naked victims, bystanders—and visually turns them inside out, as easily as one would an old shirt.

Fig. 1: Son of Saul creates new depths of field with its blurred staging of atrocities, such as in this scene where silhouetted members of the Sonderkommando surreptitiously try to take photos documenting these crimes.
Fig. 1: Son of Saul creates new depths of field with its blurred staging of atrocities, such as in this scene where silhouetted members of the Sonderkommando surreptitiously try to take photos documenting these crimes.

The genius behind Son of Saul lies in its radical negotiation of familiar Holocaust film tropes. With each recognizable narrative motif, the film undercuts or obfuscates its own pretenses, and along with them, the inherited pretenses of an already moribund genre. As Walter Metz has argued, the film “refuses virtually every basic tenet of conventional cinematic style” (http://waltermetz.com/son-of-saul-2015/), noting that unlike the conventional editing schemas of Classical Hollywood Cinema that break down space according to wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, and shot-reverse shots, Son of Saul ejects orderly edits beholden to a spectacular cinema of atrocities. Instead, the film stubbornly asserts a sustained point-of-view, realized in a series of unrelenting hand-held and long-take close-ups that radically destabilize the neatly manicured visual spaces of camps one finds in films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and The Grey Zone (2002). The latter film also depicted life in the Sonderkommando, relatively privileged units inside extermination camps that forced some “lucky” prisoners into Nazi complicity by leaving them responsible for eradicating evidence of atrocities in exchange for a handful more crusts of bread and a few extra months to live. But The Grey Zone leaves the visual universe of the Holocaust film intact, its unobtrusive cinematography a handmaiden to the morally charged quest of goal-oriented protagonists in search of personal redemption.

What makes Son of Saul so compelling is that its visual style matches, measure for measure, its radical narrative disassembly. Like The Grey Zone, Son of Saul ostensibly depicts the quest of Saul Auslander, a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, to provide a Jewish burial for a young boy. Near the end of the film, Saul saves a man from mass extermination, believing him to be a rabbi who can perform the rites. But in a key scene, the man refuses. Is he an imposter? An amnesiac? Is his faith yet another casualty in a sea of catastrophes? Meanwhile, the dead boy may or may not be Saul’s son. Fellow members of the Sonderkommando express persistent disbelief that Saul even has a wife, let alone a son. Two thirds into the film, Saul visits a female inmate in Kanada, the sorting facility at Auschwitz for the remaining belongings of those gassed by the Nazis. Significantly, she is one of the few characters reliably called by name: Ella Fried. But who is she? Wife? Sister? Daughter? Lover? The film denies us the comfort of heteronormative stability. Perhaps the only thing it confirms is that Saul’s name is indeed Saul, and that there is—or was—a relationship with another human being who has a first and last name. Ella at least has a last name. Auslander may be Saul’s. Or, as Metz notes, this last name may conveniently mark Saul for what he is within the dehumanizing confines of the camp: a foreigner unworthy of a stable identity.

Son of Saul ultimately allows us to consider a two-pronged crisis in representation. On the one hand, we are hurtling toward the end of an era when there still will be survivors who can speak face-to-face with an audience. On the other, the Holocaust film itself has achieved a cultural exchange value no longer bounded by privileged spectatorship or the limits of historical accuracy. How else could one explain the adaptation of the young adult novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? The 2008 Disney film tastefully retells the story of how two boys, one the son of a concentration camp commandant and the other a Jewish inmate, befriend each other across curiously non-electrified barbed wire. Teachers now use such films in the classroom to teach Holocaust history.

When such films get deployed in the service of this history, what they really do is introduce new generations to the lexicon of Holocaust imagery and representation. At a time when civil rights discourse and historical images of atrocity get appropriated to leverage pet political causes like fetal personhood, can anyone still believe that the imagery and representation of canonical Holocaust film should elude broader cultural appropriation as well? Just as our relationship to Holocaust history is changing amid the encroaching presence of mediated imagery that now can stand in for that history and for the testimony of actual survivors, the imagery itself has become ossified and static enough to be appropriated for all manner of meanings and agendas. The Holocaust film is dead. Son of Saul has temporarily found a way to turn its style and form inside out. Long live the Holocaust film.

Author Biography

Steven Alan Carr is Professor and Graduate Program Director of Communication at Indiana University—Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he also directs the University’s Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is the author of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. His current project examines how Hollywood's industrial process manifested a response to Nazi anti-Semitism and the growing public awareness of the Holocaust.

Works Cited