One-shot sequence from Son of Saul (2015)
Film title: Son of Saul
Year : 2015
Director: László Nemes (first feature film)
Country: Hungary
Cinematographer: Mátyás Erdély
Production designer: László Rajk
Sound engineer: Tamás Zányi
Camera: 35mm (Kodak film)
Single lens: 40mm
Format: 1.375:1 (Academy ratio)
Filming: 28 days, Budafok (Budapest)
Sound design: 5 months, voice in 8 languages
October 1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau. A face fills the screen, almost square, cropped to Academy format, compressed within the frame. Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) walks. Behind him, everything is blurred. Silhouettes move. Voices shout in German, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish. We understand without seeing: people are being pushed toward the gas chambers. Saul opens doors. Emptyes pockets. Rubs blood on the floor. The camera never leaves him. For 107 minutes, it remains glued to the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his face. The world around him, the industrial horror of Auschwitz, is reduced to a blurry halo, unbearable sounds, shadows that pass at the edge of the frame. You will see almost nothing. You will hear everything.
Why this scene is iconic
Son of Saul is not a single-take film in the classical sense; it contains cuts. But its approach to the camera is so radical, so systematic, that it fully belongs to the history of the continuous shot. Nemes and Erdély film in long, uninterrupted takes lasting several minutes, handheld, following Röhrig through corridors, crematoriums, forests, and riverbanks. The camera never leaves Saul. It never shows what he doesn't see. It never pulls back to give the viewer an overview that the character doesn't have.
It's the exact opposite of 1917 or Spectre. Those films use the continuous shot to show more—more space, more spectacle, more scale. Son of Saul uses the continuous shot to show less. The 40mm and shallow depth of field reduce the visible world to a narrow circle around Saul's face. Everything more than a meter away from him is blurred. The horror is there, in the blur, in what's off-screen, in the sound, but you don't see it head-on. You sense it. And that's infinitely worse.
Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, gave his approval: "It's a very new, very original film. It gives a very real sense of what it was like to be in the Sonderkommando. It's not melodramatic at all. It's made with great modesty." The philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a 25-page open letter to Nemes, which began: "Your film is a monster. A necessary, coherent, beneficial, innocent monster."
How they filmed it
Before filming, Nemes, Erdély and production designer László Rajk established a set of rules they called their "dogma":
The film cannot be beautiful. The film cannot be seductive. You can't make a horror film. Staying with Saul means not going beyond his own field of vision, his hearing, his presence. The camera is his companion; it stays with him through this hell.
The film was shot over 28 days on 35mm film, a deliberate choice by Nemes, who believed that only the grain of analog film could give the images "a certain instability" and "film this world in an organic way." Photochemical processing was maintained at every stage of the process, without any digital intermediaries. Nemes was adamant: "The challenge was to strike an emotional chord with the viewer, something that digital doesn't allow."
A single lens was used for the entire film: a 40mm. No telephoto lens for wide shots, no wide-angle lens for tight spaces. The 40mm produces a very shallow depth of field when filming close-ups, meaning that everything behind Saul becomes a blurry mess. Combined with the Academy aspect ratio (1.375:1, almost square), the result is a frame that functions like a portrait: Saul's face at the center, the world reduced to an indistinct fringe around him.
Erdély explained to AFI: "Every detail of every shot was planned and discussed in advance. We knew exactly what we wanted to show and how sharp or blurry it should be." The two photographs taken clandestinely by members of the Sonderkommando, the only real images from inside the extermination process, served as a direct visual reference.
The lighting is diffused, industrial, minimal. No dramatic light, no expressive backlighting, no chiaroscuro. The light resembles that of a factory. László Rajk, the production designer, who had also worked on the permanent Hungarian exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, reconstructed the crematoria with documentary precision.
The sound design, created by Tamás Zányi, took five months to complete. Human voices in eight languages were recorded and layered over the production recording. Zányi described the sound as "a kind of acoustic counterpoint to the intentionally compressed image." What you don't see, you hear: the screams behind the gas chamber doors, the off-screen gunshots, the orders shouted in languages you don't understand. The sound fills the void that the image refuses to fill.
What to observe when reviewing it
The opening scene (approximately the first 8 minutes): A single, continuous shot without dialogue where Saul carries out his work as a Sonderkommando. The victims are pushed into the locker room, then into the "showers." The second the doors close, Saul mechanically begins emptying the hooks. The screams and blows behind the door rise to an unbearable level. Saul doesn't react. Look at his face: there's nothing there. It's the most terrifying shot in the film, and you see no violence.
The blur in the background (the entire film). Practice looking not at Saul, but at what is blurred behind him. Bodies. Flames. Uniforms. The film shows everything, but through a veil that prevents you from seeing it clearly. Nemes puts you in the same position as Saul: you know what is happening, but you cannot look it in the face.
The complete absence of music . There is no soundtrack. No non-diegetic music. The only sound is that of the camp. This choice precludes any form of emotional escape; no violins to tell you what to feel, no crescendo to build up to a dramatic moment.
Did you know that?
Nemes found the origin of the project when he was Béla Tarr's assistant on The Man from London. During a break in filming in Bastia, he discovered in a bookstore a collection of testimonies written by former members of the Sonderkommando, Voices from the Ashes, who had buried and hidden their texts before the 1944 uprising. Tarr taught him the method: "Focus on the details, understand the meaning of a scene, the fact that everything is a rigorous and coherent process, from the choice of collaborators to the filming."
Géza Röhrig hadn't acted in a film since the 1980s. He's a poet, not an actor. Nemes had initially considered him for a supporting role. Part of Nemes's family was murdered at Auschwitz. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2015 (jury chaired by the Coen brothers), the Golden Globe, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the second Hungarian film to win this award after István Szabó's Mephisto in 1981.
Sources
László Nemes, Sony Pictures Classics press kit (sonyclassics.com/sonofsaul)
Mátyás Erdély, AFI interview - "The AFI Interview: Son of Saul Cinematographer"
Variety - review by Guy Lodge (Cannes, May 2015)
The Hollywood Reporter - review by Boyd van Hoeij (Cannes, 2015)
East European Film Bulletin - "László Nemes' Son of Saul" (analysis, 2018)
Wikipedia - Son of Saul
IMDB - Son of Saul, trivia and reviews
Also read:
Long Shot Code Unknown (2000) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/code-inconnu-recit-incomplet-de-divers-voyages - The other major moral lesson in the collection: Haneke, like Nemes, uses duration and the refusal to cut to neutralize the viewer and prevent them from maintaining a comfortable distance.
Narrative Effectiveness: Long Take vs. Shot Breakdown https://www.plan-sequences.com/blog-plan-sequences/efficacite-narrative-plan-sequence-contre-decoupage - Why showing less by staying behind Saul is more effective than any wide shot of the horror of Auschwitz
