2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul Chari Larsson December 2016 Feature Articles Issue 81 Abstract >> http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 1/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema But if I must continue to write, to look, to frame, to photograph, to show my pictures and think of all this, it is precisely to render such an incomplete phrase. It should rather say “It is unimaginable, therefore, I must imagine, in spite of all.” – Georges Didi­Huberman1 A horror story, the face is a horror story – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari2 In August 2015, French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi­Huberman wrote an open letter to Hungarian director, László Nemes: Dear László Nemes, Your film, Son of Saul, is a monster. A necessary, coherent, beneficial, innocent monster.3 What are we to make of these opening lines? How does one create a monster? Written in the immediate aftermath of Didi­Huberman’s viewing of the film, the letter is an intimate and emotional tribute to the director’s harrowing representation of extreme human misery set inside the gas chambers at Auschwitz­Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in 1944. Nemes adds his voice to a long and contested history of philosophical debates concerning the relationship between the Holocaust and the status of the cinematic image. How can cinema do justice to representing the Holocaust? What role can images play, without trivialising or sentimentalising an event that is located at the limit of representation? Against this hegemonic line of thought, the discourse emphasising Holocaust unrepresentability has drawn increasing scrutiny, with younger generations of philosophers such as Georges Didi­Huberman questioning the absolutism of the prohibition of representation. This article will argue that Saul Fia (Son of Saul, László Nemes, 2015) has developed explicitly in dialogue with French philosopher and art historian, Georges Didi­Huberman, a key thinker of images and author of Images malgré tout (Images in Spite of All). This article will proceed in two parts. The first will locate Son of Saul in terms of recent debates in France pertaining to the representation of the Holocaust. The second section examines how Nemes extends Didi­Huberman’s project, revealing through cinema an ongoing discussion in recent French intellectual history. What is at stake here is the capacity of images to provide access to the past. http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 2/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema How can cinema make history visible? Alternatively, how can images help us reimagine history? The Holocaust has traditionally been understood as sitting beyond the limits of representation, as “unimaginable” and therefore “unrepresentable”. This is a line of thought that can be traced from Theodor Adorno’s oft­cited warning not to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz, through to Jean­ François Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime and the Hebraic injunction against graven images. Libby Saxton has argued that questions pertaining to an ethics of representation have gained increasing momentum in recent years, as a diverse range of aesthetic responses have begun to emerge in Holocaust cinema.5 Winner of the 2015 Grand Prix at Cannes and Best Foreign Film at the 2016 Academy Awards, László Nemes’ debut feature film, Son of Saul (2015) delivers an important update to the history of Holocaust film. Like all filmmakers who have taken up the subject of the Holocaust, Nemes was confronted with the question of how cinema may best represent the enormity of the event, and film’s highly contested role as a witness to history. Cinematic responses have ranged from Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). Unlike Resnais’ retrieval of archival film footage, or Lanzmann’s extraordinary commitment to testimony, Son of Saul signals an altogether different set of aesthetic choices. Nemes combines actual historical events with a fictional narrative, exploiting the tension between fiction and a Bazanian confidence in film’s indexicality. As Didi­Huberman puts it, “You have taken the risk of constructing a certain realism facing a historic reality often qualified as unimaginable.”6 http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 3/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema Nemes’ film gives visibility to shadowy figures in the history of Auschwitz­Birkenau, euphemistically named “Special Squads” or Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando were groups of mainly Jewish prisoners charged with the day to day running of the crematoria. Their task was to maintain order amongst new arrivals, usher the prisoners into the change rooms and gas chambers, and deliver the bodies to the crematoria or the open cremating pyres. Later, they were to sort through their possessions, including separating the prisoners’ valuables, gold teeth, and jewellery. They also disposed of the human ashes as landfill or into the river, before the process was repeated. For Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, when writing on the subject of the Sonderkommando, the task assigned to history was therefore ethical: “One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.”7 Nemes takes this ethical responsibility of spectatorship, and makes it the subject of Son of Saul. Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) is a Hungarian prisoner and member of the Sonderkommando (Fig.1). One day, while clearing the bodies from the gas chambers, Saul discovers a young boy, who somehow managed to survive, only to be suffocated by an SS doctor. His body, a curiosity, is sent away for an autopsy. In the face of such horror, Saul claims the boy as his son and plans a single act of redemption: to find a rabbi and give the boy a proper burial. The film follows Saul’s frenetic search for a rabbi over the course of one and one half days. Whether the child is indeed Saul’s is beside the point, as we will never know. If this is the main story line, there are other subnarratives that Saul encounters in his frantic search around the camp. The first shows Saul and a fellow Sonderkommando member furtively taking photographs from inside the crematoria of the burning bodies outside in the pits. The gas chambers provided relative shelter from the unyielding surveillance exerted by the SS. The second was the planning and subsequent uprising against the guards. Nemes blends fact and fiction, folding both historical incidents into the storyline. http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 4/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema Figure 1: Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) Saul’s search for a rabbi is an extraordinary act of resistance, based on a powerful paradox: the already dead are trying to save the already dead. In order to maintain absolute secrecy, the Sonderkommando were routinely liquidated.8 In the film, as desperate plans are formulated for an armed insurrection, lists are simultaneously being drawn up, nominating the “expendables”. When Abraham (Levente Molnár) bitterly accuses Saul of betraying the Sonderkommando by hiding the boy’s body in the sleeping barracks and placing the group at risk, Saul responds: “We are already dead.” To accentuate this point, Saul is rendered corpse­like, his gaunt face, affectless. It is this non­ space between life and death, human and inhuman that Saul inhabits. Despite this, Saul is motivated by the very human desire to save the boy’s soul, and perhaps, even his own. Figure 2: Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 5/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema Son of Saul was developed in dialogue with French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi­ Huberman, one of the key thinkers of images in contemporary French art history and visual culture. Didi­Huberman’s reputation was forged in France in the 1990s with his ongoing revision of the discipline of art history and its normative practices.9 In the early 2000s, Didi­Huberman’s research project made a distinct turn, as his gaze shifted from issues pertaining to representation in Renaissance art, to Holocaust discourse and its trenchant distrust of images and their relationship to history. Fast forward fifteen years, and Didi­Huberman penned an open letter, Sortir du noir, to Nemes in the wake of viewing Son of Saul. This letter was quickly published by Les Éditions de Minuit in late 2015. Didi­Huberman provides a critical reading of the film, locating it in a literary and philosophical framework wholly committed to a broader rethinking of the visual legacy of the Holocaust. Some of the most heated debates concerning images and the Holocaust have taken place in France. Philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean­Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière have all, in various ways, questioned the prohibition of representation that has underpinned Holocaust discourse.10 As recent debates concerning representation no longer endorse the thesis of unrepresentability of the Nazi camps, Son of Saul is emblematic of this shift. In an interview with film critic Antoine de Baecque, Nemes declared his debt to Didi­Huberman’s 2003 book, Images malgré tout. These four photographs deeply affected me. They attest to the extermination, they constitute evidence, and ask essential questions. What should be done with an image? What can it represent? What viewpoint should we have when faced with death and barbarity?11 http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature­articles/son­of­saul/ 6/21 2/20/2017 Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul • Senses of Cinema The four photographs described by Nemes came to the fore in a photographic exhibition Mémoire des camps (Memories of the camps) held at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris in 2001.12 What makes the photographs remarkable, is they are the only images taken from inside the camps that document the mechanics of the mass extermination.