The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson)

Abstract

Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and tells the story of the largely Jewish Sonderkommandos, or ‘death squads’, that were responsible for running the camp’s crematoria. Taking its title from an essay of the same name by Primo Levi in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), the film charts the days leading up to a chaotic rising in October 1944 led by the twelfth Sonderkommando: a revolt that resulted in the destruction of half the camp’s ovens but which was ultimately put down by the SS in ruthless fashion. Portraying the day-to-day running of death factories against a backdrop of corpses and a rumbling industrial soundtrack, the film opened to mixed reviews and performed poorly at the US box office. Despite a stellar Hollywood cast that included Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, David Arquette and Mira Sorvino, it played for just nine weeks and grossed only around a tenth of the $5 million it cost to make.1 The film was not widely distributed in Europe and was only made available on DVD in Europe seven years after its original release, in 2008. Considering the notable critical and financial successes of other Holocaust films during the period such as Schindler’s List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997) and The Pianist (2002), The Grey Zone seemed to mark the limits of just how much atrocity the movie-going public was prepared to pay for, bringing to mind Stanley Kubrick’s assertion that to make an accurate film about the Holocaust it would have to be unwatchable.2KeywordsGrey ZoneDeath SquadGerman AccentHollywood FilmHuman StoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.