Anselm (Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit)

Director Wim Wenders

Wenders with Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer

ANSELM (Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit)                       B                                                aka:  Anselm: The Noise of Time                                                                                     Germany  (93 mi)  2023  d: Wim Wenders

It wasn’t […] a provocation for the sake of it.  I did what I thought was absolutely necessary at the time […]  It was during a time [1968–69] when the whole subject of World War II, fascism, the Third Reich, was not addressed at all.  In school, we had it for three weeks and that was it. At this time, it was very important to bring all this back into memory and work on it.  I held a mirror up to everyone’s face.             —Anselm Kiefer on Occupations (Besetzungen)

Having both grown up in a postwar German landscape at precisely the same time, both attending the same university at Freiburg-im-Breisgau (Kiefer studied law, Wenders studied medicine before pursuing different directions), Wenders explores the massive artistic designs of multi-dimensional artist and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, eschewing any talking heads or biographical attempts to understand the man’s life and instead delves completely into his works with an unapologetically admiring profile, literally immersing viewers into an undiscovered world, much like Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D (2010), using 3D (recorded in 6k resolution) to alter our perspective, as the depth of field changes the act of seeing, providing a more spatial context in our minds as opposed to the traditional flat surface, taking the film to a more transcendental level.  This film may actually bring viewers closer to Kiefer’s work than they might otherwise have the opportunity to see in their lifetimes.  He’s also written nearly two dozen books, none of which are explored here, also designing a one-of-a-kind series that are handmade with mixed materials, including photographs that are sometimes painted over, and are among his least accessible works, where it is usually not possible to see more than a few pages at a time when exhibited in galleries, while one publication has assembled selected pages from 75 of these in one volume, The Books of Anselm Kiefer, 1969-1990.  Premiering at Cannes as a special screening, his second film at the festival along with Perfect Days (2023) which screened in competition, it is arranged chronologically on the basis of the workshops Kiefer has had, impeccably shot by Franz Lustig and stereographer Sebastian Cramer, often feeling like floating, which really gives viewers a sense of the epic scale of the work, Wenders also employs Leonard Küßner as an award-winning German composer, where the music is the least noticed aspect of the film, though its whispered voices offscreen are reminiscent of Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987), with the director curiously borrowing liberally from a Jack Cocker BBC television documentary entitled ANSELM KIEFER: REMEMBERING THE FUTURE (2014), which seems like a controversial choice, using archival interviews as a biographic profile.  Lacking the colorful sensuality and rhythmic grace of Pina in 3D (2011), where viewers are enveloped in the dance movement of Pina Bausch, literally taking us into the choreographed realms of her imagination, this is a more somber, intellectual work, like retreating into the archives of old painting books, which is essentially what this film does, highlighting some of the staggering work of one of the greatest artists of our time, though his path has been filled with controversy, immersing himself into the “open wound of German history” at a time when Germany was still recovering from the war, where his mission was to “protest against forgetting” and recontextualize history, believing art can potentially heal not only a traumatized nation but a divided world.  He rattled some feathers in the late 1960’s and early 70’s as he outraged his fellow Germans with his photo-essay of Nazi salutes in a series of self-portraits in various European locations entitled Occupations (Besetzungen), (Occupations / Heroic Symbols – In Focus), a gesture that was not only shocking, but illegal as the Sieg Heil Nazi salute was a punishable crime in Germany since the denazification in 1945.  It was his way of forcing his fellow Germans to confront the past rather than ignore it, reaching back beyond the postwar period to many traditional German themes, calling up the history of German culture, depicting figures such as Richard Wagner and Goethe, using paintings to engage in the past and ask ethical questions. The affront he generated led to accusations from Belgian poet and visual artist Marcel Broodthaers that he’s “a fascist who thinks he’s an antifascist,” drawing criticism that he was a reactionary from the German press, which was not yet ready to open a dialogue with the past, instead espousing the political agenda of forgetting anything regarding Hitler and the Nazi’s, having purged remnants of the National Socialist ideology as an unwanted past that must be swept aside to make way for the “normalization” of the future.  Though he was largely shunned in Germany, Kiefer found a new audience in the United States, achieving fame and notoriety in equal measure in the 1980’s.  After the war, German artists rarely acknowledged the violence of the Third Reich, much less the Holocaust, while also refusing to acknowledge the presence of former Nazis in German society, many of whom returned to positions of influence, as the country at the time was instead focused on a singleminded path to modernization and economic stability.  Both known for their aesthetic explorations of German national identity, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was that rare filmmaker who similarly addressed this issue, driven to redefine what it meant to be German in a post-Nazi world, especially in his later films like BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), LILI MARLEEN (1981), and the BRD Trilogy, where a theme of forgetting the past is especially prominent in Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) (1981). 

There is no one quite like Anselm Kiefer, having studied under Peter Dreher (Peter Dreher: 'In my pictures I underline the act of seeing') in Karlsruhe and Joseph Beuys (Who Was Joseph Beuys, and Why Was He Important?) in Düsseldorf, where his painting began to elucidate his contempt for the Nazis and their reprehensible legacy, instilling his brush strokes with a combination of rage and grief, obsessively concerned with images of myth and history, which can never escape one another.  Kiefer is famous for saying “Art really is something very difficult.  It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand.”  A chronicle of a country still not ready to face its racist and murderous past, Wenders examines an artist who explores human existence and the cyclical nature of history, where his practice of creating art seeks to reclaim the spirit of German and Norse mythology, exploring how it was misused as propaganda by the Nazis, where a recurring theme is a fascination with the seasonal nature of elements and their ability to continually be reborn.  Drawing inspiration from literature, poetry, philosophy, science, mythology, and religion, the documentary is a visual and emotional experience, allowing viewers to watch such a gifted artist in the act of creation, unconventionally working through different mediums, as relatively few artists paint with blowtorches and melting pots, highlighting the immensity and complexity of Kiefer's work.  For instance, the elusive poetry of Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (the only member of his family to survive) has played a role, a constant presence in Kiefer’s paintings since adolescence when he discovered the 1945 poem written in a concentration camp, Todesfuge (Death Fugue), Death Fugue by Paul Celan - Poems, a lyrical evocation of the Nazi death camps, which Celan reads out loud as the camera slowly pans the surface of a series of Kiefer paintings, where this interaction accentuates what’s so essential about both men.  With its own intoxicating rhythm and sound, the horror of the content of Celan’s poem is made more horrific through the juxtaposition of the poem’s sonic strangeness and Kiefer’s own painterly expression, where the subject matter intrudes heavily on the surfaces, with thick black paint mixed with soot and straw, drawing us into the history of the Third Reich, though unfortunately Celan drowned himself in the Seine on Hitler’s birthday in 1970.  People are largely absent in Kiefer’s works, where there are enormous paintings of devastated landscapes, with the artist acknowledging “You can’t just paint a landscape when tanks have driven through it.”  Kiefer also works with different textures, mixing lead, glass, straw, wood, seeds, dried flowers, and ash with brick, sand, concrete, textiles, plant material, books, and fire.  As his list of materials grew, so too did the scale of his canvases, employing the use of cranes, forklifts, and a lifting platform.  Working with themes of history, memory, and mythology, Kiefer produces work that is consistently controversial and monumental in its scale and ambition, where seeing the film in a theater may help viewers grasp just how large and impressive his work really is, where an early shot from high above in an industrial sized warehouse reveals a tiny human on the floor dwarfed by the grandiosity of the building, as we see the artist bicycling through a massive studio comprised of his work, ANSELM by Wim WENDERS - Clip 1 YouTube (1:07).  We’ve seen his artistry reverently showcased a decade earlier by Sophie Fiennes in her near wordless film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), where we see the sprawling Barjac studio complex taking shape, featuring a soundtrack by Ligeti, where this may be considered an extension of that film, no longer the construction project it was a decade ago, as we’re finally able to walk inside and feel the enormity of it all.  Perhaps Kiefer and his place in history can also be viewed through the contrasting lens of different genders from Fiennes and Wenders, which bring a unique aspect to one’s appreciation, as we draw on our own personal experiences and backgrounds, often viewing the same things quite differently.  Shot over the course of two years, Wenders does provide some backstory about Kiefer’s childhood and how he became an artist, intermingling archival footage of children playing in the postwar rubble, while also introducing young actors playing a re-enacted version of the artist as a boy and young man, which happens to be played by the great nephew and son of the filmmaker and artist at different ages, Anton Wenders and Daniel Kiefer, another decision some might find questionable, where more than anything it seems to bind the vision of two German artists together, while eventually allowing the older and younger Anselm to become one.     

Wenders traces Kiefer’s path from his native Germany to his current home in France, connecting the stages of his life to the essential places of a career that spans more than five decades, where the film reinvents paintings, photographs, archival footage, sculptures, drawings, woodcuts, buildings, and landscapes, blurring the borders between the past and the present.  While some may extol the virtues of 3D, which is notorious for darkening the already darkened images of this artist, the colossal size of Kiefer’s work is already staggering, where honing in on the 3D volume and spatial largesse is not really necessary, as viewers already get the point, though it does intensify the aesthetic experience, where the sharp textures are quite simply amazing.  What really stands out, however, is one artist merging their creative vision with another, as that’s unique in any film, where the obvious question in making this documentary remains, how do you present a piece of art in a way that allows viewers to come to their own interpretation while also respecting the artist’s original intent?  Hoping to confront the horrors of his country’s history, Kiefer uses charred remnants of his paintings to make books, symbols of learning and transmitting knowledge, wanting the pages to simulate the burnt flesh of those who died in the Holocaust, taking an unflinching view of the dark side of humanity.  The son of a German art teacher, Kiefer’s books have constituted a significant part of his work, where one of the more amusing scenes has the artist flipping through the pages of a vintage old art book while simultaneously holding his cigar, something unthinkable for any of the rest of us, afraid we’d ruin the page from dropped ashes, but Kiefer is under no such illusion, as if the books were an extension of his hands, where in his mind they are inseparable.  Working in the wooded region of Odenwald for the early part of his career, he converted a former brick factory into his studio, creating an early series of sculptures of white wedding dresses dipped in plaster, headless figures that stand in a wooded landscape, monuments to the “known-unknown women of antiquity,” paying homage to poets like Sappho, whose poems were “recomposed following the quotations of men,” where most of her real words are lost to history, yet we hear the whispered voices of women, “We may be the nameless and the forgotten, but we do not forget a thing.”  When seen in 3D, beams of light reach all the way into the theater, providing a warm glow.  He would go on to create another series featuring wedding dresses, with their flowing pleats cast in plaster, resin, or bronze.  Kiefer is a great revisitor of themes, where his art is best seen not as a progression but as a cycle, a reflection of how he sees the present and the past.  “No atom is ever lost,” he points out, and so, for him, the atoms that surround him and make up his work are the tangible remains of former times and long dead people, not just part of himself, but also a part of Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and even Hitler, with sentence fragments offering a commentary on his work,  ANSELM by Wim WENDERS - Clip 2 YouTube (1:11).  The Kiefer worldview is probably best seen at La Ribaute, his sprawling 200 acre compound near Barjac in the Cévennes of France, as the nearby woods reminded him of the Black Forest of his childhood.  When Kiefer moved there in 1992 he needed 70 truckloads to move the contents of his studio, turning this quiet domain into a Brobdingnag, a fictional land of the giants, crafted on an Olympian scale, viewed as his Wagneresque Gesamtkunstwerk, surely one of the most extraordinary artworks of the last century, but Wenders offers no commentary, never questioning the gargantuan excess on display, or how it might mirror the grandiosity of Nazi aesthetics, allowing the works to speak for themselves.  A former silk factory in the 19th century, it has expanded considerably following the artist’s development projects, from the gigantic four-story concrete amphitheater to the underground networks of crypts, tunnels, and artificial ponds.  Dotting the grounds are giant cubes, teetering concrete towers made from shipping containers, a cathedral-like barn filled with house-sized paintings, an underground temple of Karnak, with a series of subterranean pavilions the size of tennis courts, each filled with a single work inside, where the colossal effect is overwhelming.  The site is what Kiefer calls “reverse architecture,” putting artifacts back into the landscape, initially moving there for its wildness and to escape the art world, but this is another way of addressing and redressing the past.  La Ribaute is no longer his main workplace, having donated that to posterity, as he moved to another mammoth-sized studio at a warehouse in Croissy-Beaubourg outside Paris.  One of the changes in Kiefer's work after his move to France was a broadening of his themes, as after leaving Germany behind, he moved on from the war as well.  Perhaps a reflection of his own mortality, his art after the 1990’s is more obsessed with a connection between heaven and earth, painting swirling constellations with the same dark tonality, suggesting both order and chaos. 

Anselm Kiefer: Remembering the Future on Vimeo  Jack Cocker BBC Documentary from 2014,YouTube (1:03:44)

The Zone of Interest

 

Director Jonathan Glazer

Glazer receiving his prize at Cannes

Glazer with Łukasz Żal

British novelist Martin Amis

THE ZONE OF INTEREST              B                                                                                      Great Britain  USA  Poland  (105 mi)  2023  d: Jonathan Glazer

Sunbeams, radiant and warm, human bodies, young and old, and who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold.  We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night, souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.                                                                                           —Read aloud while the piano plays Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf’s composition Sunbeams

Making films about the Holocaust is a genre in itself, producing a large sample size of films, where Claude Lanzmann’s epic SHOAH (1985) is arguably the best and most impactful, required viewing for each successive generation, yet other notable contenders are Alain Resnais’ NIGHT AND FOG (1956), Jan Nĕmec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) (1964), Louis Malle’s AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987), Roman Polanski’s THE PIANIST (2002), Tim Blake Nelson’s THE GREY ZONE (2002), Malte Ludin’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him (2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß) (2005), Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012), Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida (2013), Christian Petzold’s 2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix (2014), and László Nemes’ Son of Saul (Saul Fia) (2015), to name a few, though Spielberg’s SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993) may be the most popular and most watched.  In his first non-English language film, this feels more like a spiritual sequel to the chilly austerity of Michael Haneke’s formally precise The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), as the cruelty on display is overwhelming, told with a detached, observational point of view, where the privileged elite have a despicable superiority complex where they routinely order others around in a long-standing practice of servitude, taking great pleasure in causing others to suffer, motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, paying little mind to any existing humanity, viewing outsiders only for their ability to serve the master race.  Certainly one eye-opening aspect is the role German women play in the Führer’s Final Solution, where the Nazi machinery of human extermination was a murderous practice designed to remove all witnesses to the crimes of the SS, yet what they envision is a utopian world that amounts to an Aryan paradise on earth, living the dream of the Third Reich, having expanded east into Poland, claiming it’s their birthright, seeing themselves as a chosen few, an all-powerful ruling class, having the best of all things, completely indifferent to the inhumane suffering that others routinely suffer for their benefit, where a life of extreme privilege is all that matters, no matter the cost.  One of their absurdly ridiculous bourgeois concerns is having the clean linens hanging from the lines protected from the stain of a continuous stream of crematorium ash falling from the sky, like washing the blood off their hands, where no amount of cleaning can prevent the scourge of death, or ignore the foul stench of burning bodies that contaminated the entire community, as the sins of the old are quite literally infecting the next generation of the young, as even the children learn to ignore the atrocities by not looking out the window.  One striking realization is the complete absence of love in their lives, where they express love to animals, their dogs or their horses, but not to each other.  From the maker of SEXY BEAST (2000), BIRTH (2004), and Under the Skin (2013), after having gotten his start making commercials and music videos, this film won the Grand Prize (2nd Place) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, a very freely inspired adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis historical fiction novel, where the film is dedicated to him, as he died the same day the film premiered at Cannes.  Glazer’s films often involve worlds disrupted by unexpected visitors, like a psychopathic criminal colleague arriving at the door in SEXY BEAST, a ten year old boy proclaiming he is the reincarnation of the bride-to-be’s deceased husband in BIRTH, or an alien’s callous view of the human race in Under the Skin (2013), while he’s also played around with the element of empathy in fascinating and unusual ways.  This film is inhabited by the ghosts of the dead, immersed in a world of complacency, where an immense estate with gardens and flowers and even a swimming pool rests on the nightmares of the Holocaust, situated alongside a giant wall of the neighboring Auschwitz concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire, where just over the horizon there are constant sounds of arriving trains, with clouds of puffing smoke seen moving just over the rooftops, while muffled screams can be heard, and barking dogs, with angry military orders and shots fired (Oscar nominated sound design by Johnnie Burn), but only the fuming chimney smoke reveals the horrific atrocities that occur there, where an estimated 1.1 million were gassed and incinerated in the Auschwitz crematoriums, which are completely ignored by this influential Nazi family.  They’re not turning a blind eye to mass murder, they’re planning and implementing it, as the banal routines of their lives become the central focus, leaving the rest to the imagination of the viewers.  There is an intentional absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay, as nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, yet viewers are immersed into the ordinary rhythms of their lives, where they simply become numb to the deaths happening just outside their doorstep, yet there is no moralizing or rendered judgement here, but it’s suffocating just the same, as an unseen stench permeates every frame of this film.

The silence and closed walls of a theater make the viewing experience so much more impactful, as this is as much an auditory experience as a visual undertaking, with Glazer skirting the boundaries of what’s really happening by obscuring the routine killings of an extermination camp, keeping those horrors at a distance, and focusing instead on the normalcy of life taking place in that beautifully constructed mirage next door, with a spacious house with perfectly manicured landscaping, an idyllic place of bucolic peace and contentment, where the utter indifference on display is highly disturbing.  Much like Scorsese’s portrait of Native-American genocide in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), this film explores the horror of the Holocaust not by focusing on the millions of victims, but by singularly showing the perspective of the perpetrators.  Christian Friedel, the schoolteacher in The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte), is Rudolf Höss, the longest serving Nazi SS Auschwitz commandant who runs the camp from his nearby family residence, leading a quiet life in a luxurious villa that he leaves every morning to go to work, spending much of his time dictating reports by phone, basically married to his job, overseeing the arrival of the prisoners to their elimination, living with his Lady Macbeth wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), displaying pride and disgust in equal parts, with occasional bouts of histrionics, deemed the Queen of Auschwitz, their five children, the oldest already part of The Hitler Youth, and beloved family dog (Hüller’s own dog, a Weimaraner mix), all living in domestic bliss.  It is a ghoulish study of what Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil” in her 1963 exposé on Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, where her assertion is that history’s greatest evils, instead of being carried out by fanatics or sociopaths, were instead done by bureaucrats and ordinary people who accepted the heinous practices of a murderous national state as “normal,” suggesting evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.  Höss and his family go on outdoor picnics in the nearby forest, swim and fish in the streams, and entertain guests in their vast backyard gardens while tucking their kids into bed at night reading them bedtime stories, making sure all the house lights are turned off and the doors locked.  His position offers them a luxurious life, one they often dreamed of, believing this is the reward for carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution, planned in meticulous detail by Nazi officials, including Höss, who was instrumental, earning the admiration of Hitler and other Nazi leaders because of his innovative and efficient methods of murdering Jews, exuding an almost giddy pleasure in his success, where it would be impossible to entertain any idea that the family was unaware of the crimes committed in the name of the Nazi empire, as they were all complicit in achieving that heinous goal, believing it would help them reach that dream of establishing a German oasis.  At one point, a Jewish woman is brought from the camp to Höss’s office for his sexual pleasure, another aspect of the systematic dehumanization.  Hedwig fully understands her role as she sadistically oversees the daily chores of a silent cadre of terrorized camp prisoners as gardeners, housekeepers, and cooks with an iron fist, a bone-chilling display of brute power, occasionally threatening to have them sent to the other side of the wall if they don’t exactly comply with her wishes, while taking what she pleases from the stockpile of Jewish clothes, furs, jewels, and cosmetics left behind in the camp, even asking her husband for specific colors of clothing, while at the same time complaining about how Jewish women were so terribly thin.  In lockstep with the times, perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that every week she sends Hitler a bouquet of flowers from her gardens.  Edited with cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi, an abstract mix of organs, synthesizers, and voices, while shot from multiple angles with fixed, remote-controlled cameras by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who was Oscar nominated for Pawel Pawlikowski’s beautifully crisp black and white 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida and Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018).  There’s a center-focused, Kubrickian symmetry to every shot, which is geometric in its staging, expressed with almost suffocating perfection, given an antiseptic, clinical feel, where much like Kubrick, Glazer is utterly obsessive in his approach to filmmaking, which is all-consuming, as we are immersed into the lives of a family that shows no signs of any sort of moral compass, exhibiting indifference in the face of atrocities, where the harrowing portrait of normalcy in their lives is frightfully chilling, as they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, fully invested in carrying out the Führer’s vision of a master race, where the illusory nature of power leads to such a widescale murder of millions, plunging us into the landscape of death and depravity from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  While Glazer does humanize the Höss family, as Shakespeare does Macbeth, but in no way are they portrayed sympathetically, instead the vile nature of their horrific deeds is viewed as a deeply entrenched aspect of the human condition, where it’s not so much about examining Nazi ideology as exploring the human capacity for violence, and how much suffering we are willing to ignore, unleashing the murder of innocents on a scale we’ve never seen, at one point reaching a peak of 2000 lives per hour.    

The human mediocrity on display comprising the large majority of this film stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of mass murder happening just outside our vantage point, with Glazer, who grew up on the northern outskirts of London as part of a thriving Jewish community, showing a fascination with the benign routines of ordinary life, suggesting this was German life during the Holocaust, business as usual, no one in the least bit disturbed, but in doing so, despite the skillful portrayal, the victims are barely referenced, and in fact are avoided, a calculation that feels misguided, for instance it leaves out the Sonderkommando who were so prevalent in THE GREY ZONE and Son of Saul (Saul Fia), as victims throughout time have been largely negated and overlooked.  Whatever Glazer’s intentions, there’s a vacuous emptiness to the artful austerity of the film that undermines any real connection with viewers, who may be in awe of the film aesthetic, but they’re not emotionally invested.  The clinically detached design of the film stays one note and never evolves, described by director and screenwriter Paul Schrader as a parlour trick, feeling overly restrictive and overly reliant on a Reality TV-style immersion into the lives of vile characters that you can’t get away from fast enough, whose emotionally distant lives are filmed as if they are under constant surveillance.  Court psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert described Höss as objective and numb during the Nuremberg trials, where he was hung in 1947 just yards away from his Auschwitz family estate, the last ever public execution in Poland.  The film was actually shot in Poland, where the final credits are a stream of Polish names, with Glazer collaborating with the Auschwitz Museum and other organizations, provided access to the archives, and some of the meticulous historical detail is impressive, where he read the testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household, including photographs, none of which show the camp looming in the background, a sprawling complex comprised of 15 square miles, as they intentionally avoided that angle, but the film corrects that omission, as it’s an unavoidable reality.  At one point Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) arrives and is proudly shown around the grounds of the garden, given a room upstairs, where she’s haunted by the nearby sounds and the burning night sky, but no one utters a word about it, evoking a deafening silence, until eventually she leaves without a word, though she leaves a handwritten note that her daughter angrily destroys.  After a scene in which Höss reads the chillingly similar Grimm’s fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel to his children (where an ill-intentioned witch is burned alive in her own oven), the film cuts to a completely different look, a black and white thermal-photography sequence of a young girl secretly walking out into the night, resembling a dream sequence, but gradually the format shifts to standard color photography, where viewers realize she’s not only real, but an essential component of the storyline based upon Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, Aleksandra Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), a local Polish girl who was part of the underground Polish resistance (The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews) who secretly left food and medicine for the prisoners in construction sites at night, given a surreal flourish as she’s seen leaving apples, suggesting empathy does exist even in this hellish inferno.  As it turns out, she’s wearing the same dress and bicycle that belonged to her, artifacts that are part of the Auschwitz Museum.  We also see her playing a real piece of music on the piano, a Yiddish song Sunbeams that she discovered curled up in a tin written by Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf who survived the camps to become a Jewish historian, but committed suicide, writing about his frustrations in his last letter to his son, “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich, and they have had no effect.  You can document everything to death for the Germans.  Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”  In another dramatic turn, Höss is transferred to a different locale closer to Berlin as supervisor to all the camp commandants, but Hedwig is infuriated and refuses to move, firmly rooted in a place where she feels invested, where living a pampered existence takes precedence over his promotion, even if that means living without him.  The place that was hell on earth for those imprisoned in the camp is viewed as paradise on earth for Hedwig Höss.  In a pivotal scene where she confronts her husband, Hedwig is seen walking at a brisk pace alongside the camp walls (which have now been overgrown by giant trees), using visual effects to simulate exactly as it would have looked in 1943, where the barracks and watchtower remain exactly as they are.  In a stunning final sequence, Höss is at Party headquarters for a formal dress ball, attending alone, where in one moment he takes in the gravity of the boldly dramatic architecture design glorifying the Nazi Party, later seen alone on an empty stairway, where we see him peering down darkened corridors in a shrewdly calculated flash-forward to a present day cleaning crew on the grounds of the Auschwitz Museum, where they silently do their work, while in the background are glass enclosures with Jewish artifacts left behind, all that remains from the dead, a powerful image where the immense silence through the passage of time imposes its own will on viewers.