Sound and Haptic Sensuality in Son of Saul

What is it about?

This article analyses the Hungarian film, Son of Saul (director: László Nemes) that has won the 2016 Oscar for best foreign language film, the Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Globe. The article discusses the unique strategy the film makers had invented in order to represent the trauma of the Holocaust. The analysis focuses on the use of sound, in particular the role of sound design in the creation of haptic space. With the help of the analysis of the representation and artistic invocation of the different bodily senses in the film, the article demonstrates how traditional artistic formal elements are combined with high impact effects often present in popular film forms, and argues that the successful combination of these two factors makes the film an example of artistic immersive cinema.

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