Attention and ambience in The Zone of Interest (2023)

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) eschews visually representing the Holocaust and is unique in displacing its representation of the atrocities taking place in the camps to the soundtrack. Ostensibly, the film allies itself with a commitment to not showing that has a long history in debates around how to represent the Holocaust. Yet, this has led to an unhelpful opposition between the film we watch and the film we hear. This cleaves the soundtrack too neatly away from the visual track, following a tendency in sound studies to denigrate vision while idealising listening (Sterne, 2003). In this article, I argue that the film uses ambient sound to call upon a witnessing by hearing but also calls our capacity to be effective earwitnesses into question, problematising simple divisions between the visual and the auditory. The film works with ambience (ambient, acousmatic sound and ambient mise-en-scene) as an ethico-aesthetic that modulates a spectator’s attention – the ways we are called upon to listen and look. It alternates between eliciting interest and encouraging detachment, allowing viewer-auditors to feel superior to the banality of evil shown on screen, and showing them they are never too far away from it.