Daniel Zamora

“I believe” Akerman famously said in 1976, “that form highlights class relations within the image.” In other words, the truly political claim of her film was precisely to defend its autonomy as a work of art. An autonomy that Jeanne tries to defend in her own life. Not as a sphere she enjoys or that we should celebrate but rather as a space defined by its own rules, self-governed. In other words, her resistance to what could make her lose control over her actions also offers Akerman a way to make art out of it. For Jeanne, housework is a space that is still protected from the estrangement of work under capitalism.

[Bugonia] sets itself in a broader genre of conspiracy movies such as Alan Pakula’s 1974 The Parallax View, Philip Kauffman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live. In such movies, aliens or conspirators are generally de-individualized so that they can function effectively as metaphors for “the system”. A way to see such movies is as an attempt to thematize conflict in late capitalism, meaning a contradiction that cannot express itself anymore in the terms of class war. For atomized workers, the conspiracy theory provides a “useful fiction” to understand the social totality itself.

By choosing to efface ideology and fanaticism, The Zone of Interest displays a woefully poor understanding of its subject. Historical analogy, as the great historian Marc Bloch once noted, cannot be reduced to a “hunt for resemblances” or satisfy itself “with forced analogies” but rather has the task of discovering the specificities of different historical periods. It is only through the use of analogy and disanalogy that the historian can, at the same time, seize the past and the characteristic newness of our present.