How do you disturb an audience - without showing them anything disturbing?

By Ian Long

A close look at The Zone of Interest (2023) answers this question, and previews just one topic of my 'Cinema of Disturbance' workshop.

Human beings are contradictory creatures.

We spend our lives trying to avoid uncertainty, danger and unpleasant experiences, but we also pay to sit in dark rooms while filmmakers do their best to make us feel anxious, confused, uncomfortable, and generally disoriented.

The 'disturbances' that audiences actively seek out are a crucial part of thrillers, science fiction, horror, social drama - even comedy (especially satire). 

The workshop gives you the tools to deliver them in many original ways. 

It also looks at WHY people want these experiences. Because when we know this, we can supply them with even more confidence and success. 

Some examples of cinematic ‘disturbances’

Stories can make us suddenly aware that our assessment of a person is fatally wrong.

They can take us to places we'd never want to visit in real life.

They can replace our entire understanding of reality with something very different.

They can lock us into disastrous or chaotic situations.

They can make us follow the fortunes of characters who'd normally repel us.

Or they can make us deal with two conflicting realities at once.

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is an extraordinary demonstration of this. It also enables us to inhabit the mindset of people who have lost all moral boundaries.  

The Höss family's garden, with auschwitz over the wall

The Zone of Interest

A man named Rudolf Höss lives with his wife Hedwig and their five children in an attractive rural house. Rudolf takes the children out to swim and fish; Hedwig oversees the home and tends to the garden.

But this is 1943, and Höss is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which stands directly adjacent to the family home.
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Screams and gunshots are frequently heard from the camp. Its roaring furnaces provide a constant sonic backdrop. But we never see what's happening there. We just hear its .

'The Zone of Interest' creates a highly original disturbance by effectively giving us two films at once – 'the film we see’ and 'the film we hear’ (which Glazer says is ‘the real film’).  

The 'film we see' is a small tale of domestic life. Rudolf’s employers want to promote him, which would involve relocation to a new area. Hedwig is passionately attached to the house and can’t contemplate a move. This creates tension between the couple.

We get drawn into the story. Despite its banality, we may find ourselves mentally tuning out the unwelcome background sounds - 'the film we hear.' And it's this process of tuning-out that the film is about.

'The Zone of Interest' doesn't us an atrocity and ask us to react emotionally to it. Instead, it allows us to experience the psychological compartmentalisation which enable people not only to do such things, but to live among their .

It's a brilliant way of using the cinematic medium which perfectly marries form and content.

Writing lessons from 'The Zone of Interest'

The film raises various interesting questions. One is:

"Can other kinds of story show us one reality, while at the same time strongly invoking its opposite?"

The methods of 'The Zone of Interest' may seem very specific to the film, which uses them for a very particular moral purpose. But the principle can be more widely applied, and can create very different effects in other genres. ​

The important thing isn't to imitate a film's subject matter. It's to understand the mechanism that produces the effect.​ 

The 'Cinema of Disturbance' writing workshop

'The Zone of Interest' concerns a horrific subject, but it isn't a horror film.

Nevertheless, horror, more than other genre, has systematically investigated the mechanics of disturbance, and developed extremely sophisticated methods to manipulate expectation, perception, knowledge, empathy and uncertainty.

The workshop will foregrounds mechanisms of disturbance hiding in films across very different genres that can be used in your own work.

It will give you numerous ways to create your own strong and original 'disturbances.'

Because the question isn’t whether or not your story needs disturbance. ​It’s what kind of disturbance you need to create — and how well you can achieve it.

CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW FOR MORE INFORMATION, AND TO BOOK.

THE GROUP WILL BE SMALL, SO BOOK SOON!

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