Negative Space
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest has been lingering firmly in my mind since I went to see it a couple of weeks ago.
He has said how he had no interest in revisiting the attrocities of Auschwitz directly - he felt audiences had seen this film before. Instead, he wanted to explore another side of the story, a side which Martin Amis’ book of the same name unearthed for him. Glazer has talked about how there are really two films that he is presenting to the audience. The one we see and the one we hear.
It is the relationship and indeed, the tension, that exists between these two films which is such an effective device in the story Glazer tells us.
Last year I wrote about Matt Klein and Tàr and how media and entertainment with a ‘quiet voice’ - a voice which required the audience do some of the mental weightlifting required in the construction of a story - was interesting against the backdrop of the ‘dopamine diet’ of loud media.
By luck or coincidence, I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These at around the same time I went to see Glazer’s film. This too chooses to create a double story for the reader. Though in this instance, it is the story we read and the one we are left to imagine playing out after the novella’s conclusion. One of the reviews of the book describes the novel as ‘a snowglobe of a story’. What a perfect description. A perfectly rendered scene, with movement and energy, but ultimately self contained. Keegan could have continued her writing, using the novella to establish the ‘inciting incident’ for a much longer story. Instead, she chose to stop. And leave us guessing - or imagining - what came next for the central character, Furlong.
It’s probably not completely accurate to use this phrase, but I’ve been taken by how both of these stories use ‘negative space’ to such great effect. It is the story not told on page or on screen, the events that we must imagine, that create the drama and the lasting impact. The one the audience must piece together themselves, not the explicity vision of the author or artist. And these works are so much more powerful and affecting as a result.
