Sound Off In the Kubrick Zone

I dreamed a version of The Zone of Interest before I actually saw it. It turns out, when you manage expectations, you repress desires, and those thoughts show up in your dreams. To the best of my recollection, my dreamed version was a montage of short scenes strung together by an ominous feeling. Strangely, it had no resemblance to the actual movie. When I did finally see Jonathan Glazer’s follow-up to Under the Skin, I wasn’t disappointed, although that might be the wrong choice of words.

The only theater available to me that plays new movies tends to stick with franchise tentpoles so it was safe to assume they’d skip a Holocaust art film. I didn’t want to risk missing a theatrical presentation of the first Glazer film in 10 years. So, reasonably, I made the four-hour trek (round trip) to a big town with a big mall and a big theater. And as luck would have it, this theater chain had begun showing the new Noovie pre-show.

My local theater is part of a small regional chain and sometime around November 2023 they switched over their pre-show ads to the new Noovie structure that runs about six or seven minutes past the movie’s advertised start time. And as we know, that “start time” is actually the start of a 15-to-20-minute trailer block. On top of that, my theater added about 30 seconds of “We’re Hiring” promos before the trailers. Great.

For those of us who consider 15 minutes of trailers for movies like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes torture, it’s helpful to gauge when the feature presentation will begin. And to walk into the theater when Noovie is wrapping up with Maria Menounos saying, “I’m about to wrap things up” and it’s seven minutes past the movie’s start time, it may move you to submit a comment and actually sign your name instead of leaving it anonymous because you want those motherfuckers to know you mean business.

I was early for The Zone of Interest, and must’ve given myself over to anticipation because I’ve no idea if the Noovie ads ran overtime. I sat in the giant, mostly empty theater, through the commercials, trying to remain calm. A sense of manageable anxiety had come over me. And then the trailers started.

By the time the fourth or fifth trailer rolled, it became excruciating. I started to feel cold and jittery. I laughed at the start of the sixth trailer and wondered if the couple sitting four seats down heard me. Had they been waiting 10 years for a new Jonathan Glazer film, too? Certainly, they hadn’t made a two-hour trip out of devotion to the theatrical experience and found the tactlessness of pre-show ads and 20 minutes of trailers reason to panic.

I was relieved that the film, set at Auschwitz, had started. As if waiting years and driving hours and waiting a few minutes more to watch what we call an “art film” registered in the bowels of history.

I’d just started a new book, but couldn’t get into it after my six-hour pilgrimage to The Zone of Interest. Instead, it was an appropriate time to read Wartime Lies by Louis Begley, the novel on which Stanley Kubrick had based his unmade film, Aryan Papers. The story follows a young boy, Maciek, and his aunt, Tania, in Poland during the Nazi occupation. They assume Catholic identities and carry Aryan Papers, trying to stay one step ahead to avoid detection. Despite the novel’s interior consciousness and dialogue-free prose, the plot’s in constant motion. It reads like a literary road movie thriller: narrow escapes from the Gestapo, paranoid walks through city streets, the Warsaw Uprising, Maciek pinned down by German machine guns, the destruction of Warsaw, the rounding up of remaining citizens for deportation, the encroaching Russian Front, no-man’s land, hiding in the cellar as the city crumbles around them.

One particular scene stuck out as a quintessentially poignant Kubrick scenario: One day, at the insistence of their landlord, Maciek, Tania, and the other tenants step on to the rooftop to watch the German “fireworks”—the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The spectators make bets on how long it’ll take to level the ghetto and their landlord says it’s “the first real entertainment the Germans had provided in all this sad time.” Tania and Maciek simply watch with them. You can imagine their close-ups.

There’s a longer sequence near the end of the book, after Tania and Maciek have escaped Warsaw, and a train to Auschwitz, that takes place in the countryside. They farm and live with peasants, most of whom they believe have no idea of the penalty of harboring a Jew. One can’t help but picture this sequence, a respite from the many city settings—Kubrick doing Days of Heaven.

For decades Kubrick considered making a Holocaust film, but never found a suitable vessel. With the 1991 publication of Wartime Lies, Kubrick found “a dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual that represented the essence of this man-made hell,” writes his brother-in-law and executive producer, Jan Harlan. (Jan Harlan is the nephew of Veit Harlan, a Nazi film director who was acquitted of crimes against humanity. Kubrick met him in 1957.)

One would think that Wartime Lies’s relentless tension and narrative momentum would translate well to screen. But Harlan contradicts my reading of the book: he’s said that the novel, “did not lend itself easily to a screenplay,” and that the screenplay is not “over-the-top” with “lots of action.” Yet biographer Nathan Abrams writes, “Kubrick never departed or differed significantly from Begley’s book,” and that the screenplay would’ve changed during production anyway.

There are several reasons why Kubrick abandoned the project, but the 1993 release of Schindler’s List is a widely-accepted and simple answer. He was even planning to shoot outside of England for the first time since Barry Lyndon, a titanic disruption to his personal life. Abrams suggested in 2023 that the project forced Kubrick to confront his own Jewishness after writing Jewish characters out of his films for commercial reasons. He was also a perfectionist, and had been multitasking A.I. Artificial Intelligence and what would become Eyes Wide Shut for decades. “The dangerous thing for a perfectionist is that, at a certain point, he comes to a zero,” said Johanna ter Steege, who was to play Tania in Aryan Papers.

Kubrick was also having doubts. His wife Christiane, said, “He felt it just couldn’t be told. ‘If I really want to show what I’ve read and know happened.’ And he read everything. ‘How can I even film it? How can you even pretend it?’” Abrams concludes, via Christiane Kubrick, that Stanley, “simply could not bring himself to depict the horrors of the Holocaust on film.”

Does The Zone of Interest depict the horrors of the Holocaust on film? You can draw your own conclusions because I’ve rewritten this paragraph 20 times and gotten nowhere. But it’s interesting to consider how it integrates form and content: we can’t see what Rudolf Höss is doing because he can’t see what he’s doing. And maybe we’re unnerved by that result. Or maybe it’s because this approach challenges our mindset of “pics or it didn’t happen.” But what about that sex scene in Spike Jonze’s Her?

In its own way, The Zone of Interest proves that you can’t make a film about the totality of the Holocaust. You can only ask the question “Why?”

Abrams writes that after Aryan Papers was postponed, Kubrick contacted historian Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, to feel out another filmic approach to the Holocaust. “Hilberg thought that a film simply called Auschwitz and chronicling the mass destruction would be compelling.”

During that screening of The Zone of Interest, there was a sound I could’ve sworn was coming from the theater next door. Only now do I have my doubts. Sound bleed has always pissed me off. More often than not the culprit is some superhero trash blasting 20-100 hertz through the wall and through my concentration on a better film, a superior film, an art film, like Top Gun: Maverick.

Kubrick was a controlling and detailed filmmaker. This extended to the way his films were exhibited. According to biographer John Baxter, he even called some theaters himself, intoning, “This is Stanley Kubrick. Your number two projector is out of alignment.” Some people are amazed that I worry about the theaters where the picture is being shown. They think that’s some form of demented anxiety,” Kubrick told Rolling Stone in 1987. “But Lucas-films has a Theater Alignment Program. They went around and checked a lot of theaters and published the results in a [1985] report that virtually confirms all your worst suspicions.”

The Theater Alignment Program (TAP) was developed by Lucasfilm in 1983 as a companion to their hot new sound technology, THX. “Representatives visited some 100 theaters to inspect their technical systems,” says Lucasfilm.com, “to ensure that the audience experienced [Return of the Jedi] as they had created it.” TAP doesn’t exist today.

But Kubrick neglected advancements in sound technology. He released all of his films with mono soundtracks except for 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut, the latter of which was completed after he died. Why mono? Kubrick’s assistant, Leon Vitali, told DVDtalk.com, “What Stanley understood was that if you made a stereo track and the sound system was no good, you've lost half your sound.” According to Vitali, after Eyes Wide Shut was finished, Kubrick planned to update these mono mixes. But he never made it that far.

We can only conclude that Kubrick saw sound as secondary to image when it came to the medium. That’s fine with me, but what would he have thought of The Zone of Interest? Abrams’s new 600-page Kubrick bio proves me wrong. The second sentence in it is “[Kubrick] is written about endlessly and thought about even more.” Maybe the trick to dreaming a version of Aryan Papers is to try to not think about Kubrick.

Maybe Kubrick never would’ve made something as experimental as The Zone of Interest. Was Kubrick experimental? The Shining is a good candidate. And it’s interesting to read that film as a Holocaust metaphor, as Geoffrey Cocks suggested with a book that I didn’t get around to investigating before writing this essay, called The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust.

More speculation: with the switch to digital projection, one can’t help but think Kubrick would’ve preferred the reliability of DCP. Or maybe it would’ve just saved him some time. “On Eyes Wide Shut,” Vitali said, “we spent hours and hours checking release prints. We looked at one in five prints, all the prints that were made in the world.”

In today’s DCP era, aren’t we still plagued by issues like sound bleed, incorrect masking, calibration, dimness, flickering screens, and freezing computers? Not to mention these goddamn Noovie ads running over the start time!

I suppose TAP made Star Wars sound better, and other films benefited from the alignment. But how much did people really care about the sound? How much do they care nowadays? Don’t they just want to hear the dialogue? With The Zone of Interest so reliant on sound, one wonders if Jonathan Glazer considered the current quality of theaters. A full decade after his last film, and movie theaters are somehow worse now.

Maybe, like every other film director in the world, he concluded that it’s just not worth it. It certainly cost Kubrick time. “It has to be at some sacrifice to your next project, which is delayed,” said Federico Fellini on the topic of Kubrick’s exhibition interventions. Would Kubrick have made Aryan Papers had he not micromanaged the presentation of Full Metal Jacket? I don’t think so; and I don’t know how valid the comparisons are, Glazer works even slower than Kubrick.

I understand. Pre-show ads are another revenue stream for struggling theaters. But how much longer will they last when I have to sit through interminable Noovie ads before I get to watch a film with the wrong masking? Do independent cinemas have a better chance of surviving because they respect their audience and community? Will they all be gone soon?