Son of Saul · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing the film gives you is the back of a man's head. A shaved skull, a coat with a daubed cross between the shoulder blades, moving away from you into a world that will not come into focus. For long stretches that nape and that face are the only sharp things on screen. Everything behind them dissolves: a queue of the naked, a guard, fire, a heap that the men have been ordered to call 'pieces.' Mátyás Erdély shoots most of it on a single 40mm lens kept close to Géza Röhrig, on 35mm grain, inside the boxy Academy frame that walls the world in on both sides. You hear the atrocity in full. You are not permitted to see it. That refusal is the whole film, and it is also, exactly, a piece of film theory put under unbearable pressure.

Start with the face, because Deleuze does. The close-up, he says, is the affection-image: a feeling caught at the instant it registers but before it discharges into any act. Its purest form is the qualisign — an immobile, reflecting face holding a single quality, contemplation or dread, like a held note. Röhrig gives you almost nothing else. His face is a near-mask, set and depleted, legible only in flickers. The other Sonderkommando men read that fixity as madness; the camera reads it as the one surface in Auschwitz still capable of intention. Most cinema uses the close-up as a rest stop between actions. Nemes makes it the entire dwelling place, and the quality it holds — a buried, unkillable purpose — becomes the only thing the death factory cannot process.

But a face that can only look is something more specific in Deleuze, and it is the film's real engine. He calls them opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, where a character confronts something so large or so intolerable that the old circuit from perceiving to acting snaps. The person stops being an agent and becomes a seer — a watcher, an endurer. This is the crisis of the action-image, and the camps are its absolute limit case. Here is the strange tension that makes Son of Saul more than an immersion exercise. Saul is a seer trapped inside a quest. He drives forward with monomaniac will to find a rabbi and bury a boy he claims as his son. The form is pure action-image — a single fixed objective pursued across obstacles. The world it moves through has already dissolved action into futility. Every gesture toward the sacred jeopardizes the living and their doomed revolt, and the boy may not even be his. The film never tells you. It keeps the engine of melodrama running inside a universe where the engine no longer connects to anything. That friction is what you feel as dread.

Now the sound, which is where the film's intelligence is hiding. As the image narrows, the soundtrack opens. Tamás Zányi builds the entire camp out of what you can't see: orders barked across a Babel of German, Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian; furnaces; screaming behind doors; gunfire. Deleuze has a name for this once the time-image arrives — heautonomy. Sound and image stop illustrating each other and become two self-standing wholes that communicate only across the gap between them. The picture tells you about one man's narrowed field of vision. The sound tells you about the industrial murder filling every direction he isn't looking. This is also Deleuze's out-of-field in its absolute mode: not the adjacent room you could walk into, but a horror that cannot be located in any frame because it is everywhere and constant. The camp itself becomes an espace quelconque, an any-space-whatever — space cut into disconnected affective smears that no longer organize themselves into a stage for action.

There is a craft lineage under all this, and it is exact. The prohibition comes from Lanzmann's Shoah, which refused to reconstruct the gas chambers at all and built its testimony from words over empty ground. Nemes keeps the refusal but smuggles the killing back as blur and sound. The durational long take comes straight from his apprenticeship with Béla Tarr — the choreographed, depth-staged shots of Werckmeister Harmonies where the event happens out of focus behind a tracked body, here pulled from contemplative distance into a hunted close grip. The fusion of restricted point of view with a hallucinatory soundscape is the lesson of Elem Klimov's Come and See. And the opacity is Bressonian: the affect-suppressed 'model' of Au Hasard Balthazar, violence kept off-screen, expression withheld so that you lean toward the face instead of being told what it feels.

What did it do to the form? It found the off-screen as an ethics. Bazin trusted the long take to keep reality whole and ambiguous; the Shoah filmmaker inherits the worry that any reconstruction of mass death becomes spectacle, a thing consumed. Son of Saul answers by making withholding active rather than tasteful. The horror is choreographed in meticulous detail precisely so it can be denied to your eye. The burial Saul attempts is, in Deleuze's sense, a gest — a posture that exposes an entire relation, the last assertion that a human body is not a 'piece.'

Watch it again with the edges. The film has already decided what you may see. Give your attention instead to the soft periphery and to your ears, and you will find the death factory was fully present the whole time, just outside the only face that still meant to do something.