For cinephiles, a new film by Jonathan Glazer, one of the most distinctive directors working today, is always considered a bit of an event. That’s certainly the case with his latest, the deeply unsettling Auschwitz-set drama The Zone of Interest, a movie that stands several universes apart from anything else you’re likely to see in cinemas this year. Nearly a month after seeing it, I find it still rattling uncomfortably around my brain. It’s a work that plenty will struggle with, for various reasons, but it’s indelible in a way few films are.
If The Zone of Interest might be considered an event based on its own merits, its also an event due to how just long-awaited it is. It’s the first film in more than a decade for Glazer, who has never exactly been one to churn ‘em out. The director has released four films since his 2000 debut, Sexy Beast. Compare that filmography with Martin Scorsese who, despite being considered to be in the autumn of his career, has released four films – The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon – in the time since Glazer released his last one, 2013’s hypnotic sci-fi horror Under the Skin.
Glazer belongs to a class of artists who tend to release work at their own pace. In film perhaps his most famous forerunner is Terrence Malick, a director who went a full two decades between the release of his films Days of Heaven, in 1978, and The Thin Red Line, in 1998. (In fairness the prospect of topping Days of Heaven, one of the greatest films of the greatest decade for film, would probably daunt any director.)
The album is perhaps the artform we associate most with keeping fans waiting. Chinese Democracy, Guns N’ Roses’s tortured – and tortuous – follow up to Use Your Illusion, is probably the most referenced example, though for me the gold standard for musical tardiness will forever be My Bloody Valentine, whose long-promised fourth album appeared in our most anticipated lists for 2022 and 2023 (but not 2024 – you won’t fool me thrice, Kevin Shields). There’s also The Wrens, a band who spent 20 years tinkering with the follow-up to The Meadowlands, and ended up falling out horribly over the whole thing.
It’s not just rockers either – perhaps now we should add Rihanna to the list of tardy artists, given that she is still to release the follow-up to 2016’s Anti, though in fairness she has been quite busy building one of the world’s biggest cosmetics brands. And of course, we’re discounting all the groups who broke up and then reformed and released a new album decades later – Abba perhaps the most famous recent example.
TV, with its tight schedules, is less tolerant of tardiness – but even here there are exceptions: Larry David taking a six-year break between seasons eight and nine of Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example. And while the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones never struggled with scheduling, the author of the novels upon which it is based, George RR Martin, is still toiling over the sixth novel in his A Song of Ice of Fire septology – 13 years on from his last instalment, A Dance with Dragons. In fairness, Martin has churned out a small publishing house’s worth of Game of Thrones-related novellas, reference books and short story collections – not to mention had a hand in two Game of Thrones-related series – though some might dismiss these as ways of procrastinating from the task in hand. (Harper Lee, with a 55-year gap between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, is a more valid shout here, though the controversy around the release of the latter book complicates the story a little.)
There always seems to be a note of dismissiveness aimed at these more languidly paced artists, dismissed as disorganised, disengaged or simply lazy. That’s always struck me as a little unfair. After all, there are any number of reasons for an artwork to be held up – funding issues for your latest indie film, never-ending tours booked by your manager, family changes, health issues, sample clearance woes, the odd global pandemic or just classic writer’s block.
And why shouldn’t we celebrate artists being given the time and space to make the art they want to make? Some need a hard deadline for sure, but others might thrive with a bit more freedom. Clearly that style suits Glazer, allowing ideas to percolate and extensive research to be done (he spent two years studying the lives of The Zone of Interest’s two central characters, Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig).
Prolificness doesn’t equal quality – just look at Terrence Malick: after that slow spell, has enjoyed a period of relative sprightliness, with five films released since 2011’s long-gestating The Tree of Life. But … have you seen any of those post-Tree of Life films? Most of them, if they haven’t been reviled (his music-industry romance Song to Song), have been pretty much ignored (has anyone seen Christian Bale in Malick’s Knight of Cups?). Sometimes slower might be better.
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