12/28/2022 0 Comments Son of saul ending![]() ![]() He and his fellow Sonderkommado prisoners are constantly scurrying, frantically working, trying to avoid any undue attention from the guards. Notice how often he’s looking over his shoulder, even as we’re instinctively trying to do the same. The forced perspective is focused, intense and narrow.Īs Saul, Röhrig adopts the expression of a wild animal - emotionless, watchful, mindful only of survival. After the picture is over and we take a breath, pausing to consider the bigger history that encompasses Saul’s story, the large-scale loss of the Holocaust feels all the more catastrophic. By blurring all else and confining us to one man’s experience, Son of Saul zeroes in on humanity in the singular, reminding us how every single life that was snuffed out distinctly mattered. Either way, applying this extreme cinematic technique to incomprehensible history made for a monumental viewing experience, a way of relocating mass atrocity to a personal level. Or perhaps the method makes things worse by inflaming our cursed imaginations. We observe all of this in the only way we could bear: at the corners of the frame, where screams are heard but not seen and the bodies being dragged pass by as white, abstract flashes. As a member of the Sonderkommando, Saul has prolonged his own life by helping to herd new prisoners into the gas chambers, promising them showers and telling them to “remember your hook number.” After they have been killed, he and others frantically gather the clothes, stack up the bodies and scrub the floors, making way for the next crowd of victims. Röhrig plays Saul Auslaender, a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau near the end of World War II. The forced perspective is focused, intense and narrow. The camera rarely veers from a close medium shot of its main character (Géza Röhrig), so that the action surrounding him is either fleetingly glimpsed or blurry. Son of Saul, from first-time writer-director László Nemes, is filmed in what’s commonly called academy ratio, so that the compressed frame is nearly square. Take away the subject matter and first consider the technique.
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