Christopher Nolan vs Jonathan Glazer
The most boring first shot of all time? Oppenheimer opening.
Similarities first – they’re both white, British, middle-aged, university-educated, privileged men who direct motion pictures. They both made biopics (J Robert Oppenheimer and Rudolf Höss) set during World War II which recently won Oscars (seven for Oppenheimer, including Best Film; two for The Zone of Interest, including Best International Film).
The similarities end there. Nolan makes overblown, overrated, hollow, boring films. Glazer makes stunning, highly visual, complex, original films.
Did I find Oppenheimer boring because it was boring or because I knew it was a Nolan film? Likewise did I find The Zone of Interest brilliant because it’s a brilliant film or because I knew it was directed by Glazer? Will we ever know or care?
There’s been a recent run of terrible, boring and misconceived biopics with one-word titles: Maestro (Leonard Bernstein), Blonde (Marilyn Monroe) Diane (as in Princess) and Mank (Herman J. Mankiewicz, writer of Citizen Kane). Being in black and white is optional but seems to add to the monotony (Maestro, Mank, Oppenheimer partially).
Oppenheimer’s black and white segments add to the general collage feel of the film, a stream of trailer-like moments. In a dialogue-heavy film, music features over much of it (as it would in a trailer). For a film with supposedly ‘stunning visuals’, much of it focuses on a tedious security hearing in a tiny room with a lot of men in suits, and then, yeah, another hearing in a courtroom.
Though we are constantly told how Oppenheimer’s work changed the world (which it obviously did), in the film it remains in the fairly dull realms of science and politics, the outside world nowhere to be seen.
Which brings us neatly onto The Zone of Interest, where the outside world is also not seen – but it is heard. Glazer’s audacious film presents the family life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, who lives with his wife and children on the other side of the wall of the notorious concentration camp.
We witness the family’s seemingly idyllic life in their house and garden – doing chores, ordering servants around and having coffee mornings – mostly oblivious to the horrific sounds of gunshots and shouting on the other side of the wall.
Glazer’s filming methods – including hidden cameras (giving the film a surveillance-like or Big Brother feel) and thermal imagining cameras (used by military but also by photographer Richard Mosse in his project Heat Maps, 2017) – make the film have the look of a documentary. Indeed in a film with little plot, The Zone of Interest is compulsive viewing and stays in the mind long after the film ends.
Glazer’s last film, Under the Skin, had a similar impact on me. With the friend I saw the film with, we’d talk about it every time we met up for months afterwards (Scarlett Johansson plays an alien driving around Glasgow in a white van. Go figure).
Jonathan Glazer’s volume of the Directors Label series of DVDs featured his early award-winning music videos for Radiohead, UNKLE and Massive Attack, as well as adverts for Guinness and Levi’s. He has only made four feature films thus far, Zone being his latest after Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin.
Christopher Nolan has made a dozen films, most of them overrated, confusing, stupid and boring. To be fair, I liked Momento when it came out and Insomnia was okay but the rest? Forget it. Nolan should have been banned from making films after his Batman trilogy, ushering in, as they did, a whole world of inane Marvel comic movies and letting teenage boys in their bedrooms dictate what makes a good film (I blame the internet for his popularity).
I’ve expressed my views on Nolan previously in passing (here and here). Nothing’s changed, except he’s been allowed to make more films (Tenet was a pointless, confusing mess).
No one can tell a straight story any more, from beginning to end – though nothing wrong with that (I’ve quoted Godard before when he said “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”) – it can add tension and drama telling stories in a non-linear way. But like with using black and white, it can be a technique just for the sake of it. I often think film or TV makers have a long, boring film or series on their hands and think chopping it up in the editing room will add interest. It tends not to.
Previously on Barnflakes
Top 10 free films to stream, February 2024
A study in Scarlett
Amazon Prime / Netflix mash-ups
Film directors in London street sign names
The top 100 films
My childhood just flew by