Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has so far taken the 2016 award season by storm with his unflinching concentration camp drama, Son of Saul. With the film opening on Friday, Nemes discusses the story and its real-life inspirations…
How did the idea for Son of Saul come to you?
When we were making The Man from London, in Bastia, 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’s a book of texts written by former Sonderkommando members from the extermination camps who had buried and hidden 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.
What was the Sonderkommando? What did its members do?
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 assassinated there every day. During the course of their mission, the Sonderkommandos were given a relatively preferential treatment. They were allowed to take food found in the transports and, within the confines of their perimeter, have a 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 organization, 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.
But how do you go about telling a story, a fictional story, from within the middle of a fully functioning extermination camp?
That was problematic, indeed. I didn’t want to make a hero of anyone; I didn’t want the survivor’s point of view, nor did I want to show all or even too much of this death factory. I just wanted an angle that would be specific, pared down, and to tell a story as simple and archaic as possible. I chose the viewpoint of a man, Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian Jew, member of the Sonderkommando, and I strictly upheld this position: I show what he sees, no more and no less. Yet it isn’t a “subjective stance,” because we see him as a character and I didn’t want to reduce the film to a purely visual approach. That would have been artificial. Aesthetics, any exercise in style or virtuosity needed to be avoided. Moreover, this man is the point of origin of a unique, obsessive and primitive story: he believes he has recognized his son among the gas chamber victims and is henceforth determined to save his body from the ovens, find a rabbi to say Kaddish and bury him. Everything he does is defined by this mission, which seems utterly pointless in the context of the hell on earth that is the extermination camp. The film concentrates on one point of view and one person’s line of action, which allows the character to come across other points of view and other actions. The camp, however, is perceived through the prism of Saul’s journey.
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.
Did you have any other films in mind?
Come and see by Elem Klimov was a great source of inspiration for me. The movie follows a boy in 1943 on the Eastern front and stays with him in an organic manner through his hellish adventures. But Klimov allowed himself far more baroque things than we did.
Who is the person 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 is 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. He moves, is given to fidgeting, but also knows how to keep silent and still.
Son of Saul screens at HOME from Fri 27 April. Book tickets, watch the trailer and find out more here.
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