A few weeks ago, the YouTube algorithm gods suggested a video essay to me, which was an analysis of The Forbidden Zone, or at least its framing and directorial techniques. The video was so captivating, I had to watch the film, just to see what all it was about.
Normally I don't review or even muse about the films I watch, but The Forbidden Zone has had such a particularly long afterlife for me, I think it may be worth the exercise. By afterlife, I mean the amount of times I've found myself thinking about the film, or its contents, after having seen it. I would estimate it to be about two weeks, which is far longer than any film in recent memory, save perhaps for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
While there is plenty to discuss with regard to the film itself--how it tells without showing, how it evokes emotion through the denial of exposition, how it subjugates its characters to its directorial narrative--I want to start with what happened after I watched it.
First, I found myself saying the phrase "Hand gemeldet" over and over again. There is a short scene in the film, where the camp director's wife is giving her mother a tour of their home, after she has arrived for a visit. Walking confidently up the stairs--mother in tow--upon hearing her exclaim over the beauty of the wallpaper, she gestures at it and says "Hand gemeldet". In English, this simply means "hand-painted", but I found the German translation to be sonically so much more interesting. Gemeldet. There is a curviness to meld, and a finality of the det, that for whatever reason, instantly evokes in my mind, a vivid scene of Jewish artisans, painting the delicate, subtle curves, and this one phrase somehow encapsulates the betrayal of the Nazis so well to me. Perhaps, because I know about IG Farben, the chemical and paint company which manufactured the poison gas Zyklon B, so "paint" in the context of Nazis has a particular association. I'm not quite sure why this stuck with me for so long after. Maybe it was the emotion it caused within me--the instant she said it--I felt a pit open up in my stomach, as I realized, exactly whose hands had painted those walls, and in whose house they stood, and whose eyes now gazed upon them approvingly, with admiration, and marvel, and that--as someone familiar with hand-painted wallpapers--I too, was captivated by the subtle walls, and that my eyes, too, were admiring the unconsenting work of so many victims.
The entire film is filled with such little moments--betrayals, I think is the right way to call them--so many that after a while it becomes difficult to notice them. But they are always there, and if you pause at any moment, you could probably pick out a few. It's a clever device, which creates a sense of un-reality--how much of what we see is "real", meaning, a part of our modern understanding of humanity and morality, and how much of it is Hand gemeldet?
In addition to finding myself destabilized by the whole film experience, the primary feeling post-watch was that of unanswered questions. What exactly was happening that we could not see? Was it as bad as it sounded? It is worth watching the video essay--I'll try to link it here--at this point, as there are some technical details that make the whole film even more incredible. First, what we see in the foreground has nothing to do with the sounds happening in the background. There were, in fact, two movies made, the first was the family melodrama, without background noise. The second was a masterful work of sound design, including recordings of real people making real screams, real trains, real guns, etc. What we watch is the union of these two movies. And while I knew this going into seeing the film, I never had the feeling that the characters were fully unaware of their surroundings.
Getting back to these questions--the what, how, and why--which are never answered by the film. These unanswered questions fueled a week-long Wikipedia binge for me, and for quite a few days afterwards, my browser tabs consisted of Bandcamp releases, emails, and various concentration camp Wikipedia pages. I read and read, trying to understand how, and then trying to understand why, and then back to how, and back to why. I read about all the camps, the marches, the operations leading to the construction of the camps, the methods of construction, the sizes of the chambers, and so on. This movie, far more than Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice ever did, drove me to learn and understand more than I ever had. I read witness testimony from the Nuremberg trials. I watched videos of the liberation of Dachau. I looked in Google street view at the ominous, spindly pine forests surrounding Auschwitz. And why? All because the film refused to show instead of tell.
I keep coming back to this idea of showing versus telling, in the context of this film, particularly because film is usually the medium that has no choice--it must show, at a minimum--if it tells, it is just superfluous. Yet here, what is shown is not really what is being told at all. Or, you could argue that what is being shown is in opposition to--or a distraction from--what is being told.
To wrap things up a bit here, I think it's one of the most impactful films I've seen, if not for the film itself, but for everything just out-of-frame--which includes everything after the credits roll. Almost as if it wasn't really a film at all, but just something that happened, in the same world that we live in on a day-to-day basis, in the same places and with the same people.