Watching The Zone of Interest for this week, I was so drawn to the scenes of a girl under an x-ray, night vision filter placing apples and pears into the ground. These clips were so separate from the typical cinematography of the rest of the film. Jonathan Glazer maintains his pattern of long takes, but the difference in color is more than notable. What I also noticed in one of these sequences is that the audio is a continuation of Rudolf reading the story, Hansel and Gretel, to his children before bed. Then I was like–Woah. Is Hansel and Gretel Nazi propaganda? Here’s a link to the fairytale again for those who need a refresher. I had to look into this, because I had never heard about it being used in this way. There is no journalism focused on the use of Hansel and Gretel in the movie past a couple of Reddit posts, so here come some articles that touch on its usage:
Embedded above is an article from Film Quarterly. It mentions that, “When crosscut with Höss reading Hansel and Gretel to his children, the scenes of resistance take on an ethereal, fairy-tale-like quality that seems at odds with the film’s overriding resistance to sentimentality” (Amy Herzog, Film Quarterly). I thought this was an interesting thought, and likely mirrors Glazer’s direct intention of including the fairytale. The act of resistance being leaving a trail of apples as a parallel to the trail of bread crumbs in Hansel and Gretel is such an interesting choice. In Nazi propaganda, Hansel and Gretel were made to represent two blond German children, and the witch a Jewish person who is ultimately burned alive in the oven she tries to cook the children in. By including this trail of apples, Glazer mocks that propaganda and creates an entirely different, benevolent narrative.
Here’s an article from Vanity Fair. In this interview, Glazer reveals that the girl with the apples was a real person, whom he met when she was 90 years old! Although the film does not explicitly disclose what is based on a true story and what isn’t, there are many characters that are based on real people, including this hidden hero.
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