Film Review: Son of Saul

Auschwitz presents "a multiplicity of realities, a multiplicity of meanings, perspectives and approaches that co-exist simultaneously." 1 Son of Saul is director László Nemes' cinematic interpretation of one specific perspective of Auschwitz as envisaged by the film's protagonist, Saul Ausländer, a prisoner of the camp, who, as a member of the Sonderkommando, was assigned a particularly onerous task-working in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau.Son of Saul should have provoked debate about the enactment of those events, and the placement of a camera at the threshold of that sacral, albeit mimetic space.If, according to Theodor Adorno, writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, 2 what about creative endeavours seventy years after Auschwitz?With the passage of time between the realities of Auschwitz and their contemporary re-creation, the boundaries of the limits of representation have become increasingly indistinct.The near universal praise from film critics, and numerous prestigious awards bestowed upon Son of Saul (such as the Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), suggest an almost unquestioned acceptance of the film's leitmotif, which is no longer considered artistically transgressive in this visually permissive YouTube era.The film's acclaim, coupled with affirmative nods from French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman 3 and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann 4 (who has long rejected fictional cinematic representations of the Holocaust) seem to support Son of Saul as both a tour de force and the realization of an effective representational strategy within the challenging genre of Holocaust cinema.Son of Saul is a demanding film that is difficult to watch; it takes the audience on a journey where few artistic endeavours have gone before.By setting the film in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and by expressing that he "wanted to show people how the situation really was" 5 , Nemes sets the moral and representational stakes high; a critique of the film must therefore be considered accordingly.More than one million victims, mostly Jews, died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, making it the most lethal of the Nazi concentration and death camps.The epicentre of the killing took place in the four crematoria buildings housed in Birkenau, the largest within a network of camps and subcamps which made up the Auschwitz complex.It is the main setting for Son of Saul, as evidenced by the unequivocal mise-en-scène of the film; the viewer is immediately plunged into the terror of this univers concentrationnaire.6 It is the latter half of 1944, the time gleaned from the storyline of the prisoner revolt, which resulted in the sabotage of Crematorium IV.The Sonderkommando, or Special Squads, were comprised of prisoners, predominantly Jewish, forced by the SS to usher 1 Jonathan Webber, The Future of Auschwitz: Some Personal Reflections (Oxford: Oxford

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