Cinematic Soundscapes in Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015)
Son of Saul is a film directed by László Nemes which follows Saul Ausländer, a Jewish prisoner forced to work as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. When Saul believes he has found the body of his son, his central concern becomes giving the child an appropriate Jewish burial, complete with saying the Kaddish prayers. The film is a counterpoint personal crisis surrounded by impossible catastrophe where the protagonist handles thousands of dead a day, narrowly escapes a dangerous nighttime Aktion and immolation, but remains fixated on the personal commemoration of a single life. The film captures the critical function of the Sonderkommando while alluding to some of their most prominent historical moments in the camp, notably the heroic images taken in secret and buried from around a wooden door showing bodies burning outside the gas chambers, and the Sonderkommando revolt of 1944.
The film is set apart from other Holocaust films in its immersive and often disorienting terror. Cinematically, the perspective follows Saul often from behind, like a spectator over his shoulder. The filmmaker, László Nemes, described Son of Saul as an attempt to present the Holocaust from an immersive, personal perspective. He aimed to avoid the traditional, distanced portrayal of history by following the protagonist, Saul, closely with a shallow depth of field, keeping the horrors mostly at the edges of the frame. The scenes of clearing gas chambers are all the more horrific and dehumanizing with abstract piles of corpses blurred and yet narratively fixating the audience. Similarly, the depth of field with a transport which arrives in the night, the horror of Saul loosing his lifeline to safety – his “X” marked Sonderkommando jacket – is disorienting to the audience inserting us into Saul’s blind terror trying to escape.
The sense of terror and disorientation in Son of Saul is heightened by the sounds of the film and the lack of score. Nemes emphasized that the film is about individual experience rather than broad historical narrative, forcing the audience to engage with Saul’s emotional and psychological state and highlighted the importance of sound design in creating an oppressive, realistic atmosphere. The soundscape fills in the gaps, making the experience even more immersive and unsettling. The baseline “score” of the film is that of sound, not music: a layered, chaotic, and oppressive atmosphere that reflects the overwhelming reality of the concentration camp. There is no musical score at any point in the film, believing that adding one would create an artificial emotional manipulation. Nemes wanted the film to feel raw and immediate, avoiding any sense of aestheticization or sentimentality. Instead, the natural and ambient sounds of the camp—muffled screams, distant gunshots, machinery, and hurried whispers—serve as the film’s auditory backdrop, making the experience more visceral and authentic. Critically, music as it appears in Son of Saul reflects realities of musical life in the camp. Clandestine music played among the Sonderkommando and presumably Hungarian prisoners reflects the instruments retained by the Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerlager in the fall of 1944 and indicates unofficial music being made solely for solidarity or survival without SS sanction in the camps. On the other side, a stuttering Saul is mocked by an SS officer who then dances, sings, and briefly grotesquely parodies a Jewish dance. This is also an accurate depiction of musical sadism and religious mockery both in camps and by the Einsatzgruppen at execution sites.
More than any other film, Son of Saul accurately captures the Gesamtgewalttätigklang or total violent sound of the concentration camps. Sounds like shoveling (ashes), clangs, walking, even conversation aren’t inherently violent, but become terrifying and violent in the concentration camp nexus. Furthermore, these sounds punctuated by those of clear horror, like screams, shouts of perpetrators, sobbing, and death from the gas chambers combine with the more quotidian soundscape of the camps into this total, violent sound, a sound which was pervasive and affronting every hour of the day for prisoners. Analogous to other assaults on the senses, like des Pres description of Auschwitz as an “excremental assault”, so too were these soundscapes a constant reminder of death and horror.
In the film, there is a constant backdrop of sonic death and violent sound. The Sonderkommando shovel ashes, working more furiously when approached by Nazi overseers. The sounds of undressing in the gas chamber anterooms are the most prominent sound, creating a sonic blur paralleling the visual blur of doomed individuals just out of sight. The shouts of Hebrew and Yiddish in solidarity or in warning, the shouts of German are always a staccato, the dogs who joined in as co-collaborators are a punctuation of the soundscape. Actualized violence is also a punctuation to the baseline soundscape, with the addition of gunshots or screams
In Son of Saul, this violent soundscape is consistently juxtaposed with an almost intrusively humanizing sign of life from Saul, his own breath. The sounds of life from the individual are a sharp contrast with his constant interactions with death, both facing his own destruction and continuously handling the dead. Here sound reflects the personal and the overwhelming where the breath of Saul is clear and at times too present against a constant hum of terror and violent sound.
Also interesting is the use of sound between human and non-human actors. The dogs often bark before their perpetrating masters approach, with German foregrounded by animal noises. At the opening and the end of the film, birds and water create a frame for the entire narrative, where this entire barbaric structure of the camps, of life and death, are all inflected horror on the natural landscape, a film detail reflective of the sites of Auschwitz today where songbirds tweet above the vast fields of buried ash. However, the birds at the opening and close both sing outside the camp, first as the camera approaches Auschwitz with a blurred background, and at the end after the men of the Sonderkommando revolt and escape are shot in the forest. The abstract meaning is clear, there is no nature in Auschwitz: none of that horror is of this world.
The key narrative arc of the film, of Saul attempting to say Kaddish for a boy he believes to be his son is also sonically reinforced. As he carries the corpse of the boy to the river bank after the revolt and escape of the Sonderkommando, he frantically tries to dig a shallow grave with his bare hands. In a hushed but equally frantic voice, he implores his compatriot to sing Kaddish, a half measure with no minyan. To echo the futility of the situation, his friend whispers, not sings, not speaks, only the opening lines of the prayer and is unable to continue, so he throws himself into digging with Saul. The two men are unable to adequately sing Kaddish or dig a grave, so Saul takes the boy with him into the river, where he loses him and barely comes out with his friend to the other side of the river to escape.
The final scenes of the film have a notable sonic shift. The escaped Sonderkommando are in an outdoor barn or building trying to change clothes after their flight down the river. A living boy, Polish or German comes across the barn and makes long eye contact only with Saul who slowly smiles. There is a visual transference with the camera angle as we leave Saul’s eyes and follow the boy’s jacket through the forest. Sonically, we leave the breath of Saul and the experiences of the men entirely and briefly fixate on the different click of the well-polished approaching German boots. The boy is literally silenced with a gloved SS hand over the mouth, before he his allowed to continue, but never betrays the men. The SS never speak, they have no sound nor faces except as wordless functionaries accompanied by their dogs who chime in either ahead or behind the boy, a final disorienting perspective. As we follow the boy out of the film, the sounds of nature return, and the boy fades from sight without us following. A round of gunfire is followed by dogs, then a final single gunshot followed by almost complete silence, no birds, no running, no breath, no signs of life from either perpetrator or victim.
By Alexandra Birch, 2025