White Hot and Agfacool: Race, Heat, and Colour in The Zone of Interest

Take for instance the scene in which Hedwig shows her baby daughter flowers in the garden (fig. 7). The overall colour of this sequence is surprisingly cool given it takes place on a sunny summer’s morning. The blue of the sky tends towards a pale grey, the greens of the grass, plants and her dress have a dimmed quality, lacking the yellow undertones that might enliven them. Hedwig’s legs, in direct sun, are a strikingly muted shade of beige, while her face takes on the stoney cast of an ashy taupe in the shadow, (a colour Pantone calls “White Smoke”). Indeed, make-up artist Pokromski telling notes that the tones of make-up used on the cast’s faces were called things like “porcelain” and “alabaster”.²⁷ No concession is made either in the on-set lighting or in the post-production colour grade to warm up or brighten her face when she looks down and it is cast in grey shadow. Roger Luckhurst’s description in Sight and Sound of the film’s “slightly leched, metallic colour grading” accurately describes this effect, of drained, bloodless colour, that makes skin seem cold, waxy, and anaemic.²⁸

This look was also produced though Bishop’s extensive work sharpening the images. Despite being filmed in deep focus, a major part of the colour grade was enhancing the crispness of each scene. Glazer instructed Bishop to make it “pin sharp” to enhance its contemporary feel and avoid using shifts in focus to guide the audience’s gaze or emotions. This is achieved in the grade by taking any area of contrast and exacerbating it to produce much crisper edges to objects (leaves, grass, hair, etc). This sharpening avoids any similarity to the “softer images” associated with celluloid as well as forms of emotional manipulation produced through soft focus. Bishop described how this process transformed the perception of colour and particularly how “it does really change how the skin tones are perceived…  it did change how things feel.” Although Bishop admits, “I’m not sure how or why,” it seems plausible that the sharpening of the images impacts the colour temperature through an effect described by Albers. Noting in Interaction of Colour, that identical shapes will appear to be more “hard-edged” when rendered in colder rather than warmer hues, it seems the opposite may also be true here—it is the sharp edges that make the colours seem cooler.²⁹ Eugenie Brinkema observes something similar about drab, grey colour, describing how, “in its chromatic deficiency, it brings line to the forefront.”³⁰

Tellingly, Bishop’s instruction was never to make the colour look cold, detached, or unemotional, it was simply to, “keep it as natural as possible,” yet in keeping with the wider ethical parameters of non-manipulation and retaining a contemporary feel to the film, coolness became a byproduct of this techno-ethical practice. If we return to established debates on colour and monochrome in Holocaust film, we can see how the coolness of colour in The Zone of Interest resolves some of the fraught debates over the sensationalism of colour and the distancing effect of black-and-white. Here, the coolness of the colour at once makes these images seem contemporary (in their digitality) and thus avoids critiques of abstracting or distancing this material, but it also lacks the sensationalism associated with warm, vivid colour (it presents no form of nostalgia, romance or glamour). But how does this rhetoric of naturalism intersect with the film’s depiction of whiteness and white skin? How does the transformed “feel” of skin that Bishop describes intersect with the film’s wider ethics and politics?

Agfa’s manufacturer was a subsidiary of IG Farben, the world’s largest chemical conglomerate and synthetic colour manufacturer at the time (Farben is the German word for colours or dyes). In addition to dyes the firm made plastics, explosives, rubber, textiles and countless other products. Operating in symbiosis with the Fascist state, IG Farben was also intimately entangled in the Holocaust. Not only did the firm exploit camp prisoners for chemical experiments, but the extermination camps consumed vast quantities of Zyklon B, the insecticide manufactured by IG Farben subsidiary Degesch, used as the gas in the gas chambers.³⁴ IG Farben went on to establish its own concentration camp in 1941: Auschwitz III at Monowitz, to further exploit enslaved labourers in manufacturing synthetic rubber and fuel for the war effort (indeed, at one point in The Zone of Interest Rudolph mentions a forthcoming “IG Lunch”). IG Farben established further sub-camps of Auschwitz at nearby mines (Fürstengrube, Günthergrube, Janinagrube) to sustain the company’s incessant consumption of coal (the base ingredient of synthetic colour).³⁵ It is estimated that around 10,000 Auschwitz prisoners died working for IG Farben and that at its peak the firm had 13,700 enslaved labourers working within its supply chain.³⁶

While Agfacolor itself was not manufactured at Auschwitz nor is there evidence that coal mined by enslaved labour was used as its colouring agents, such arguments are, as anthropologist Michael Taussig argues, somewhat beside the point.³⁷ To focus on any single element within the IG Farben system is, as Taussig suggests, in some ways is to comply with IG Farben’s logic of compartmentalisation and overlook the interconnectedness of its operations.³⁸ While Agfacolor was not a direct product of Auschwitz, it was enmeshed in the horrifying networks connecting genocide, industry, and colour. While this film stock had a cool tonality, it was materially contingent on forms of thermal violence, on heat in the form of coal, and the wider military-industrial networks of the concentration camps that exploited the starkest form of thermal biopower through the crematorium.

The “cool” of “Agfacolor-cool” came from its recognizable palette, described by Jennifer M. Kapczynski as “quite unmistakable: greying greens, darkly saturated reds, and wan blues.”³⁹ In each of the Agfacolor images cited above (all captured in bright sunlight), all the chromatic flaws associated with the process are on display: both saturation and contrast are low, the sky is grey-green, grass grey-brown, and the reds do not “pop” with brilliance but recede from the viewer.⁴⁰ While these images uphold conventionally gendered renditions of white skin (the male soldiers are more ruddy than the children and women seen here) the shadows cast on the paler white skin tones still produce a blue-grey tonality—most visible on the skin of the bather in Braun’s film. This cool, crisp, muted aesthetic was a result of Agfacolor’s material composition. Its make-up produced much crisper images than alternative processes at this time. Contemporary advertisements for Agfa promised, “objects near the camera and those in the far distance are both absolutely sharp,” indeed that ‘‘everything is razor sharp”.⁴¹ But despite its sharpness it gave especially muted colour. To penetrate its three layers of light-sensitive emulsion required large quantities of light, and so the film was often used outdoors to take advantage of natural sunlight, giving it a sunny, bright tonality. Yet the density of the emulsion layers also meant the colours appeared muted, unable to reach brilliant levels of saturation possible with rival processes. Agfa was therefore position as a so-called natural process, both because of its use outdoors in natural settings, and because its pastel shades appeared less contrived than the high saturation of other technologies.⁴² It is clear why German critics found resonances of this supposedly “natural” stock in the “natural” grade of The Zone of Interest.

While muted colour itself carries no inherent political meaning, to describe the look of Agfacolor as “natural” is an inherently ideological act. It is to make a particular way of seeing and thus a particular world order seem unmediated, direct, legitimate, inevitable, truthful, accurate, and normal. In relation to colour film, the term “natural” is often deployed in relation to a technology’s capacity to render flesh tones, with colour film technologies that privilege the accurate rendition of white skin over darker skin tones described as delivering “natural” colour.⁴³ Contemporary Agfacolor reviews described how its “Flesh Colouring is Perfectly Natural.” In other words, the ascription of “natural” privileges some truths (e.g. light skin) over others (e.g. dark skin) and thus makes certain political systems (e.g. white supremacy) seem innate.⁴⁴ Agfacolor thus mobilised the idea of the natural to political ends by making life under the Third Reich seem like an entirely normal state of affairs, whether Hitler taking tea on the terrace as we see in Braun’s home movies, or the Hoss family children playing in their garden next to the genocide unfolding on the other side of the wall.

The way in which the supposedly “natural” look of Agfacolor normalised white supremacy is made explicit in this 1935 test image for the process, which belongs to a genre known as the Shirley Card or China Girl (fig. 13).⁴⁵ These images feature white women positioned next to colour charts—ostensibly used by processing laboratories to ensure colours are reproduced faithfully. However, these images are widely regarded as a technique for ensuring the accurate rendition not of all colours depicted, but of white skin specifically, and thus are understood as an apparatus for reinforcing the primacy of whiteness. The juxtaposition here of two young, white girls with the swastika flag of Nazi Germany doubles the racialised reading of such images. Here, the image is (presumably) calibrated both for the best rendition of the girls’ white flesh tones as well as the red of the flag of the Third Reich symbolising the supposed supremacy of this “race.”

While Bishop confirmed the intention behind the “natural” look of The Zone of Interest was part of an ethics of transparency—a non-interventionist approach intended to retain the cool digitality captured on set—the film’s resemblance to Agfacolor offers a complimentary reading. If the “natural” hues of Agfacolor worked to normalise white supremacist ideology, we might say the “natural” palette of Glazer’s film and the cool whiteness of its skin performs the same function, only to different ethical ends. The Zone of Interest is clearly also invested in normalising fascism, in rendering its evil banal (to repeat one of the most widely stated claims of writing on the film). Yet it does so not to imply the truth and legitimacy of the white supremacist world order it depicts but to horrify and unsettle viewers precisely through its supposed normality. It is because the film exploits the visual language of naturalism that it has the power to shock, in the same way that we as contemporary viewers are shocked by Braun’s Agfacolor home movies. In each of these examples, colour has the capacity to render natural that which is morally aberrant. Glazer hoped his film would invite audiences to reflect on the contemporary moment, and forms of oppression, brutality, and cruelty enacted today to which they choose to remain blind. Whether consciously or unconsciously, by cultivating a look that simultaneously appears contemporary to our present moment and to the historical period it depicts, both digital-cool and Agfa-cool, the film successfully enables us to reflect on how past ideological techniques of naturalisation are still at work today.

I want to move now from considering the coldness of the film’s colour, to thinking about the heat of its black-and-white sequences, captured using thermal cameras. Not only does this thermal technology intersect with the racialized contexts of whiteness within the diegetic world of the film, but it also speaks to the wider context of debates over their politicised exploitation in policing racialized (specifically non-white) bodies in our contemporary world.

We read in subtitle form the lyrics of “Sunbeams,” a song written in Yiddish by Auschwitz survivor Joseph Wulf, whose recorded voice introduces the music.⁵¹ In warm yellow captions (distinct from the cold white used for the translated German dialogue) we read: “radiant and warm/ Human bodies/ Young and old/ And we/ who are imprisoned here/ Our hearts/ are not yet cold/ Souls afire/ like the blazing sun.” The song’s lyrics help us interpret the ideology of the thermal imaging sequences. They now become legible as a way of capturing what we could call human warmth. Rather than registering the superficial appearance of the human body (light), the camera captures what animates its soul (heat). This distinction is crucial for understanding the ethics of these sequences as they relate both to the conventional uses of thermal imaging technologies and to the whiteness of the figures they capture.

As noted in my introduction, these thermal images are not inherently greyscale—this was an aesthetic choice. Bishop noted in our interview that: “You could have mapped it to colour but we mapped it to black and white . . I’ve seen a colour version of some of the shots . . .  they came in in black and white and [we] were only ever using black and white . . .  it was never a conversation about it being in colour”.⁵² While each pixel is mapped to correspond to a certain temperature, the colours used to represent those temperatures are arbitrary. While in The Zone of Interest and some other films that exploit thermal imaging, such as Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015) and Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sollima, 2018) the hottest temperatures are mapped to white (fig. 17, 18), in other films such as Predator (McTiernan, 1987) or more recently Aggro Drift (Korine, 2024) the hottest areas are pink, purple, reds, yellows and orange, descending to the cooler areas in lime, turquoise and navy (figs. 19, 20).⁵³

The manufacturer of the camera used in The Zone of Interest, offers palettes that range from scorching acidic magentas through to neon blues, each palette given a different name suggestive of various climactic conditions, from, “Rainbow,” to “Arctic,” to “Lava” (figs. 21, 22).

In The Zone of Interest, the decision, not only to shoot the scenes using thermal cameras, but in the black-and-white palette called “White Hot” (fig. 23), offers further insights into how questions of heat intersect with ideologies of race so central to the film’s context. If Glazer positions these sequences as images of resistance, they do not just resist the murderous and racist logic of the camps but the murderous and racist logic of film technology itself.

These scenes were shot using a FLIR X8500, a military surveillance camera.⁵⁴ Despite the manufacturer boasting on its website of the camera’s applications in search and rescue operations, or slowing climate change by identifying insulation leaks, the fact that, as Glazer notes, “we had to have someone from the Polish army with us every time we took it out of the box, because its officially classified as a weapon,” suggests its more nefarious applications.⁵⁵ This becomes apparent if we look to other precedents of thermal imaging in films like Sicario: Day of the Soldado (fig. 18) which combines the technology with aerial shots of the US/Mexico border to demonstrate its function for the American government in identifying human targets from the air.⁵⁶

These uses of infrared thermal cameras, not just by the military but other actors (industry, agriculture, police) have been critiqued as a form of what Starosielski calls “thermal violence, a means of reducing a subject to their thermal emissions, of turning life into heat that can be used in forms of biopolitical management.”⁵⁷ The abstraction of images into a chromatic register of black-and-white, whereby colour is mapped to heat, seemingly renders neutral the racialized characteristics of skin colour (in Glazer’s film for instance, all skin is rendered white). But as Lisa Parks describes in her discussion of thermal imaging drones, the application of this technology in policing the movement of certain people in certain territories (she specifically sites Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and the U.S. border) means that it, “reinforces already existing power hierarchies,” by “designating these areas and people as ‘hot spots’ that need to be pre-emptively contained.”⁵⁸ While the thermal imaging used in cinema typically exploits a “White Hot” look, it is important to note that FLIR’s website claims it is its “Black Hot” palette that is, “a favorite among law enforcement,” as it “displays body heat in a clear, lifelike image.”⁵⁹ In the image accompanying the description, a man’s facial features are entirely unreadable, rendered as an engulfing mask of blackness (fig. 24). While we might imagine Glazer’s decision to exploit a “White Hot” palette, was to convey an idea of nighttime (as the majority of the image will be rendered black) we cannot dissociate this aesthetic decision from its deep entanglements with racialized surveillance.

Despite the profoundly racialized deployment of these cameras, artists have tried to recapture the utopian promises of thermal imaging as a kind of colour-blind vision—indeed, Korine describes his use of the technology as “documenting souls.”⁶⁰ Much critical discussion of the potentials and limits of thermal imaging has focused on Irish photographer Richard Mosse who has used both infra-red film and thermal cameras to subvert expectations regarding the relationship of colour to race.⁶¹ In his 2021 series “Infra” the photographer captured images of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo using Kodak Aerochrome film developed for reconnaissance during the Vietnam war, initially designed to make figures stand out from foliage, but here it is the foliage that most powerfully leaps out at the viewer in scorching fuchsia hues  (fig. 25). In his 2016 series “Heat Maps” (fig. 26), made using a military thermal camera, he captured images of migrant camps across Europe, the middle east, and north Africa, deliberating exploiting a technology that in his words, “dehumanises people,” in order to try and “rehumanize” these subjects through detailed attention to their daily lives.⁶² While critics maintain that Mosse’s photographs reproduce precisely the biopolitics they seek to critique—Black bodies rendered hyper visible against pink foliage, racialized migrants’ identities reduced to a mass of biological heat signatures—Glazer’s film succeeds in exploiting the utopian promises of thermal imaging, I believe, because it trains the technology on bodies racialized as white.

What is so startling about the thermal sequences in The Zone of Interest is that they so radically subvert our expectations of how light and colour work in cinema. In conventional black-and-white cinematography, the most illuminated areas are white, the least illuminated are black. In thermal imaging, whiteness signifies heat, not light. This meant the production team had to heat the things they would normally light.⁶³ These thermal cameras therefore rewire the entire logic around which cinema operates and—in the context of Glazer’s film—challenge the ideology that underpins that logic.

As Richard Dyer describes, cinema is “a medium of light”—a technology predicated on recording and capturing light.⁶⁴ For this reason, Dyer observes, cinema has privileged whiteness, as white skin not only reflects light, but is rhetorically conflated with light through its wider connotations of purity and transparency. The success of any cinematic apparatus is therefore measured by its capacity to faithfully render white skin—understood rhetorically as light itself. As the Agfa test card described above shows, white skin is also understood as a benchmark against which colour should be measured. The conflation of whiteness as a racial taxonomy with light as an optical phenomenon therefore undergirds both racist ideologies and film technologies. In The Zone of Interest however, the thermal cameras decouple this link between light and whiteness. By registering heat instead of light, the cameras circumnavigate a racist logic of white supremacy that both underpins the camps, and the cinematic apparatus. To be clear, it is not that the camera renders white those bodies considered outside the parameters of racialized whiteness under Nazi race “science.” Instead, these sequences present a different way of seeing that challenges the optical logic that underpins the ideology of those taxonomies.

Comparing the chromatic whiteness of the thermal imaging sequences to the chromatic and racialised whiteness of the Höss family further elucidates this point, and illuminates Glazer’s comments that they are “on the opposite end of the spectrum.” If as Dyer describes, whiteness insists on its immateriality, transparency, and invisibility in order to sustain its power, in The Zone of Interest there is a resolute opacity, solidity, and corporeality to both racialised and chromatic whiteness.⁶⁵ For example, chromatic whiteness operates in the film as a conventional—and problematic—symbol of hygiene and cleanliness—an association that has longed helped consolidate ideas of racialised whiteness as a form of moral and racial purity. Throughout, we see freshly laundered white shirts, towels, and sheets, in the Höss family home. However, the film highlights the fallacy of such associations—most obviously in the white laundry that obscure the camp from sight, concealing the messy work necessary to sustain the mythic purity and imagined superiority of racialised whiteness (fig. 27). It is telling that in the thermal imaging sequences, when we visit the home of the young Polish resistance fighter, we see the reversal of this trope. While the sheets in the Höss family home are white, here they are black, and are swiftly drawn in from the line because of the ash and smoke that fills the air around the camp (fig. 28). Their whiteness is revealed to be illusory, a condition of suspending one’s disbelief about the dirty work of genocide.

The startingly white outfit Rudolph wears to his family garden party is another example of how whiteness participates in the dissemblance that enables life on his side of the wall to appear normal (fig. 29). Exchanging blood-soaked boots for pristine white loafers, Rudolph’s immaculate white outfit masks the bloody work he undertakes in the camp. The only shot within the camp—a low angle shot of Rudolph presumably overseeing prisoner selection at the ramp—fades to white, as though Rudolph is engulfed by the smoke from the crematorium chimney or the train that brings victims to their deaths (fig. 30). Whiteness, although conventionally associated with illumination, clarity, and light, here obfuscates and obliterates, literally engulfing the image so we do not see the horrors that Höss surveys.

Racialised whiteness within the film also takes on a distinctively corporeal quality, in marked contrast to conventional constructions of whiteness as disembodied, immaterial, unmarked and unremarkable—in other words, as synonymous with light in terms of both luminosity and weightlessness. As Anne Anlin Cheng describes, although race is typically understood (after Franz Fanon) as an “epidermal schema” legible through the surface of the body, there are different modes of “racialized corporeality”— some predicated on “fleshiness” and some on what she calls “unfleshliness.”⁶⁶ While Blackness has routinely been construed around ideas of the corporeal flesh, whiteness has been produced through its opposite—immaterial light.

However, whiteness in The Zone of Interest works against such idealised forms of race making. While above I have detailed the ways in which Rudolph’s skin undoes conventional aesthetics of whiteness, it is Hedwig’s body that most palpably express the corporeality of whiteness, in pronounced contrast to idealised constructions of white femininity as ethereal, radiant, and light. In her performance Hüller adopts a wide, rolling, flat-footed waddle for Hedwig’s gait, which coupled with the repeated placement of her hands at her lower back while projecting her hips forward, make her seem, if not pregnant, then a person whose body has been indelibly marked by its five pregnancies (fig. 31). The effect is one of weight, heaviness, bodiliness. The almost mechanical way she consumes cakes and sausages also speaks of a character who exists within her body rather than her mind (fig. 32, 33), in keeping with directions from Glazer of, “perpetual non-thinking,” to articulate what he calls the “thoughtlessness” of Genocide.⁶⁷

Even her blonde hair, a privileged symbol of white femininity which as Dyer notes has conventionally been lit to produce a golden, angelic halo around the face, here, is tightly wound into implausible dense knots that lack any kind of gleam. Her skin, like Rudolph’s, has the colour of pale flesh lacquered with white sunscreen, unnaturally and unhealthily opaque and white. The close similarity of Rudolph and Hedwig’s skin tones is also unusual, as conventionally the lightness of the female complexion is enhanced through contrast with her slightly more tanned white, male partner (fig. 34).⁶⁸ This simultaneously makes Rudolph seem paler than we would conventionally expect and undermines classical conventions of feminine beauty.

The opacity, density, thickness, and heaviness of both chromatic whiteness and racialised whiteness therefore undermines the conflation of these concepts with light and thus the myths of invisibility and purity upon which white supremacy thrives. The thermal images on the other hand, refuse to see light and instead register heat. They therefore bypass an entire logic of film technology that privileges white bodies, and instead foreground those bodies that are full of heat and life, their “Souls afire.”

But the thermal images, which also shift the film from colour to black-and-white speak to another function of colour within Holocaust cinema. As Miriam Hansen notes, it has become an accepted convention of ethical Holocaust representation that films must incorporate some form of modernist reflexivity that questions the very act of representation—“a type of aesthetic expression that is aware of its problematic status.”⁶⁹ Citing Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) as an important precedent, which refuses to incorporate any visual representation of the Holocaust at all, she describes how filmmakers are expected to acknowledge the inadequacy of images to impart anything approaching truth. This can also be articulated through colour. For instance, in Alain Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog (1956) the landscape of present-day Auschwitz is captured in colour, while archival images are all presented in black-and-white, destabilising the truth-telling capacity of images themselves. Night and Fog’s shift between Eastmancolor and black-and-white stock draws attention to the act of mediation, inviting us to question which of these images helps us know and understand better, only to resolve that understanding is always partial, and arguably impossible.⁷⁰

Glazer’s film similarly uses the shift between black-and-white thermal images and digital colour as a way of unsettling cinema’s claims as an apparatus of truth. The framing of the monochrome sequences in a manner that invites the audience to read them as dreams or fairytales disrupts our experience of the film thus far, which has until this point been presented in a very direct, observational, so-called natural, style. But as the only sequences that take us inside the camp, with its mud and freshly dug mass graves, the thermal images also have a privileged relationship to the reality of Auschwitz, despite their attenuated relationship to an aesthetic of realism. By uncoupling a naturalistic style from ideas of unmediated truth, and approaching the interior workings of the camp through extreme stylisation, we are invited to question which is the dream, the fairytale, the fantasy: the colourful world of the Höss family home or the strange, greyscale interior of the camp? The Zone of Interest thus takes up a well-established convention of Holocaust cinema (the vacillation between colour and monochrome) yet through its novel use of thermal imaging finds a contemporary way of re-articulating its reflexivity.