02/27/2024
As a film composer, when watching a film, I usually focus my attention on the film score and its role within the dramatic landscape of the movie but when watching Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant and harrowing film ‘The Zone of Interest’, the overall sound rather than the music became a character as important as anything onscreen. The film’s music, composed by Mica Levi, had an unusually restricted role. The score totalled only 14 minutes, 10 of which were at the beginning and end of the film, accompanying extended black screens. Without images onscreen, Levi’s choral score was abstract, horrifying and meditative, contradictions that fit well with Glazer’s portrait of the banality of evil. But it was the soundscape that riveted my attention, calling attention to what we didn’t hear. Johnnie Burn, the sound designer, took great care in creating a soundscape that was historically accurate to Auschwitz. The specific sounds coming from behind the concentration camp’s high walls like gun shots, German shepherds barking, people walking on gravel wearing clogs within the resonant echo heard between the camp’s buildings, these sounds were all carefully researched and replicated. But they were used only as sporadic punctuation to the muted dull din of the never ceasing crematoriums that were the backbone of the soundtrack. Glazer and Burn’s decision that ‘less was more’ for the soundscape and music was audaciously perfect. As the film progressed, I became more and more aware of what I wasn’t hearing beyond the never ending throb of industrialized murder. It was more than enough.
