Music, Sound, and Memory in Holocaust Film

The Holocaust, a historical trauma of immense scale, continues to challenge our understanding of humanity and demand acts of remembrance. Film, with its capacity to construct immersive narratives, has become a crucial medium for engaging with this complex history. Central to this engagement is the strategic deployment of music and sound, elements that transcend mere accompaniment and become active participants in shaping our understanding of the Holocaust on screen. This online exhibition explores the multifaceted relationship between sound, music, and the representation of the Holocaust in film, examining how these artistic tools navigate the challenges of historical representation, emotional authenticity, and the ethical considerations inherent in portraying such profound suffering.

Within the broader context of film sound theory, the use of music and sound in Holocaust film presents unique challenges. Beyond their traditional roles in establishing setting, creating atmosphere, and heightening emotional impact, these elements must also grapple with the weight of historical memory and the potential for exploitation or trivialization. How can filmmakers use sound to convey the unspeakable, to evoke the lived experience of victims, and to avoid reducing the Holocaust to mere spectacle? This exhibition investigates these questions, exploring how music and sound contribute to the narrative construction of the Holocaust, influencing audience reception and shaping prevailing cultural understandings of this historical tragedy.

Jojo Rabbit's controversial comedic approach necessitates a nuanced understanding of its sonic landscape. We analyse how the soundtrack, blending popular music with more traditional scores, reflects the film's complex tonal shifts and its exploration of evolving identity within a context of pervasive ideological pressure.

The soundscape of Son of Saul represents a transformative approach to Holocaust cinema, one that rejects conventional musical scoring in favour of raw sonic authenticity. By avoiding a traditional soundtrack, Nemes creates a devastating auditory experience that refuses to provide emotional distance or relief. Where a musical score might guide viewers through emotional responses or offer cathartic release, the unrelenting "Gesamtgewalttätigklang" of Son of Saul provides no such refuge. The audience, like Saul himself, must navigate this sonic landscape of horror unmediated.

The breathing of Saul—that persistent, intimate sound of life—ultimately emerges as Son of Saul's true "score." This breath becomes the film's metronome, measuring out moments against the cacophony of death. When that breath finally disappears in the film's closing moments, replaced by distant gunshots and then silence, we understand sound's ultimate power to convey both presence and absence. Nemes demonstrates that in representing the Holocaust, sometimes the most truthful artistic choice is to trust in the unbearable authenticity of sound itself—allowing the camps to speak their own terrible language without the mediating influence of music.

This approach stands in compelling contrast to Jonathan Glazer's recent film The Zone of Interest (2023), which similarly eschews traditional scoring but deploys sound differently. While both films reject musical manipulation, Glazer's soundscape emphasizes the banality of evil through domestic sounds juxtaposed with distant camp noise. Where Son of Saul immerses us in chaotic proximity to death, The Zone of Interest creates horror through sonic compartmentalization—the muffled screams and machinery of Auschwitz becoming background noise to garden parties and family dinners.

Spielberg's Schindler's List, conversely, relies heavily on John Williams' iconic score to guide emotional responses. The violin theme provides moments of reflection and emotional processing that Son of Saul deliberately denies its viewers. When music does appear in Schindler's List—the girl in red's encounter with a street musician, or the infamous scene of an SS officer playing Bach while shooting camp prisoners—it serves as diegetic counterpoint that heightens moral contradictions. Yet these moments risk aestheticizing horror in ways that Nemes and Glaser explicitly reject.

Alain Resnais' groundbreaking documentary Night and Fog (1956) occupies a pivotal position in Holocaust cinema's sonic evolution, particularly through its revolutionary use of Hanns Eisler's score. Unlike later works that would either embrace musical emotionality or reject it entirely, Resnais creates a dialectical soundscape where Eisler's modernist compositions function not as emotional manipulation but as critical commentary. The music maintains a deliberate emotional distance—sometimes dissonant, sometimes hauntingly beautiful—that refuses both sentimentality and raw immersion. This approach creates what scholar Claudia Gorbman terms "anempathetic music," which stands apart from the images rather than reinforcing them. When juxtaposed against the film's stark visual transitions between color footage of abandoned camps and black-and-white archival material, Eisler's score becomes a third voice in conversation with both past and present. Most significantly, the film's narration by Michel Bouquet, delivered in measured, almost detached tones, creates a tripartite sonic structure where speech, music, and devastating silence work in concert to resist both emotional catharsis and documentary objectivity. Night and Fog thus established an early template for Holocaust representation that neither aestheticizes suffering like Williams' score for Schindler's List nor commits to the unmediated horror of Son of Saul, instead creating a reflective sonic space that implicates the listener in the act of witnessing.

Klimov's Come and See (1985) constructs cinema's most visceral sonic manifestation of war trauma, deploying sound as both witness and weapon. The film's ground-breaking audio design gradually deteriorates in tandem with protagonist Flyora's psychological state—beginning with natural ambient sounds that progressively transform into a disorienting soundscape where explosions become muffled, voices distort, and tinnitus overtakes clarity. This auditory deterioration functions not merely as subjective experience but as epistemological commentary: war destroys not only bodies but perception itself. Unlike conventionally scored war films that attempt to render violence comprehensible through musical framing, Klimov refuses such narrative comfort. The sporadic appearance of Bach's music serves not as emotional guidance but as ironic counterpoint to barbarism, creating a dissonance between cultural achievement and human capacity for atrocity. Most devastatingly, the film's meticulously crafted sound design places viewers within Flyora's compromised hearing—we experience his partial deafness directly, making us embodied participants rather than distant observers. This sonic strategy ultimately rejects both heroic war narratives and distanced documentary objectivity, instead creating what scholar Michel Chion might term an "audio-visual contract" that implicates the audience in the unbearable sensory reality of witnessing.

The Last Musician of Auschwitz explores the unsettling role of music in Auschwitz, where it served as a means of survival, a tool of torment, and a silent witness to unimaginable cruelty. Instead of portraying music as simply redemptive, the film examines its complex power within a genocidal system. By carefully restoring archival audio, it allows viewers to hear the actual sounds of camp performances, avoiding sanitized modern interpretations. When surviving sheet music is played, the film focuses on the worn pages, forcing us to consider how culture's highest forms were perverted within the camp. Notably, the documentary's limited use of added music creates powerful silences that act as potent sonic memorials. Rather than using music for easy emotional release, "The Last Musician of Auschwitz" presents the camp orchestras as a real-life example of the question posed by philosopher Theodor Adorno: can art truly exist after Auschwitz, and can we appreciate its beauty without somehow condoning its misuse?