Tweet
An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
A scene from Yael Hersonski’s “Film Unfinished,” an investigation into an incomplete Nazi propaganda movie.
For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.
Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, these images were subjected to a radical rereading with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged. Over and over, in multiple takes, we see well-dressed Jews enter a butcher’s shop, ignoring the children begging outside. In a similar scenario, prosperous-looking passersby are directed to disregard the corpses abandoned on the sidewalk. The propagandists’ manipulation of their half-million prisoners was now clear, even as its eventual purpose — perhaps more than just to manufacture scenes showing callousness on the part of wealthy Jews toward their less fortunate brethren — remained as murky as ever.
In “A Film Unfinished,” the Israeli director Yael Hersonski embarks on a critical analysis of “Das Ghetto” that is remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. Moving methodically reel by reel and acknowledging the “many layers of reality,” the director creates a palimpsest of impressions from multiple, meticulously researched sources representing both victims and oppressors.
Though excerpts from a taped interview with Willy Wist, one of the cameramen who worked on “Das Ghetto,” are as evasive as one might expect, other witnesses did not hold back. Readings from personal diaries, like those of Adam Cherniakov, the head of the Jewish Council (whose apartment was used by the Nazis to stage several scenes), and from the minutely detailed reports of the ghetto commissioner Heinz Auerswald, provide vivid insight into the restrictions of daily life and the methods of the Nazi filmmakers.
Carefully pairing actual scenes with the journal descriptions (the film’s editing, by Joëlle Alexis, is astonishingly exact), “A Film Unfinished” is really an exploration of watching — or, more precisely, of the difference between watching and seeing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the director’s decision to invite five survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto to view the original footage and to film their reactions.
“What if I see someone I know?” one woman asks, hardly daring to look. As the flickering atrocities play across the survivors’ faces — one film observing another — Ms. Hersonski silently creates space for memories. More than just valuable reality checks (“When did you ever see a flower? We would have eaten a flower!”), these recollections anchor the past to the present, and the images to human experience, in a way that shifts our perception of the Warsaw film. Whether cringing at the sight of naked men and women being forced at gunpoint into a ritual bath, or contemptuously dismissing the Nazis’ efforts to highlight Jewish privilege (“My mother wore her beautiful coat, and sometimes a hat. So what?”), the survivors seem to speak for those who cannot.
Moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative, “A Film Unfinished” positions familiar Holocaust horrors (the R rating was unsuccessfully contested) within a philosophical commentary on the way we view images. Perfectly pitched narration (by the Israeli musician Rona Kenan) fills in crevices in the visual record, but the most eloquent testimonies are delivered by those who are mute: starving Jews gazing uncomprehendingly at the Nazi cameras, and a lovely young woman squirming with discomfort as she is forced to pose alongside a beggar.
In the end, however, the value of Ms. Hersonski’s work lies less in what is shown than in her persistent reminders of what is not. By drawing our attention repeatedly to the filmmaking process itself — staging Mr. Wist’s testimony as a re-enactment; using a whirring projector to divide reels; freezing again and again on Nazi cameramen inadvertently trapped in their own fabrications — Ms. Hersonski blatantly emphasizes the hand behind the celluloid curtain. As we leave the theater, her thesis question echoes: when there is no one left to bear witness, how far can we trust the evidence of our eyes alone?
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/08/18...tml?ref=movies
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
A scene from Yael Hersonski’s “Film Unfinished,” an investigation into an incomplete Nazi propaganda movie.For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.
Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, these images were subjected to a radical rereading with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged. Over and over, in multiple takes, we see well-dressed Jews enter a butcher’s shop, ignoring the children begging outside. In a similar scenario, prosperous-looking passersby are directed to disregard the corpses abandoned on the sidewalk. The propagandists’ manipulation of their half-million prisoners was now clear, even as its eventual purpose — perhaps more than just to manufacture scenes showing callousness on the part of wealthy Jews toward their less fortunate brethren — remained as murky as ever.
In “A Film Unfinished,” the Israeli director Yael Hersonski embarks on a critical analysis of “Das Ghetto” that is remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. Moving methodically reel by reel and acknowledging the “many layers of reality,” the director creates a palimpsest of impressions from multiple, meticulously researched sources representing both victims and oppressors.
Though excerpts from a taped interview with Willy Wist, one of the cameramen who worked on “Das Ghetto,” are as evasive as one might expect, other witnesses did not hold back. Readings from personal diaries, like those of Adam Cherniakov, the head of the Jewish Council (whose apartment was used by the Nazis to stage several scenes), and from the minutely detailed reports of the ghetto commissioner Heinz Auerswald, provide vivid insight into the restrictions of daily life and the methods of the Nazi filmmakers.
Carefully pairing actual scenes with the journal descriptions (the film’s editing, by Joëlle Alexis, is astonishingly exact), “A Film Unfinished” is really an exploration of watching — or, more precisely, of the difference between watching and seeing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the director’s decision to invite five survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto to view the original footage and to film their reactions.
“What if I see someone I know?” one woman asks, hardly daring to look. As the flickering atrocities play across the survivors’ faces — one film observing another — Ms. Hersonski silently creates space for memories. More than just valuable reality checks (“When did you ever see a flower? We would have eaten a flower!”), these recollections anchor the past to the present, and the images to human experience, in a way that shifts our perception of the Warsaw film. Whether cringing at the sight of naked men and women being forced at gunpoint into a ritual bath, or contemptuously dismissing the Nazis’ efforts to highlight Jewish privilege (“My mother wore her beautiful coat, and sometimes a hat. So what?”), the survivors seem to speak for those who cannot.
Moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative, “A Film Unfinished” positions familiar Holocaust horrors (the R rating was unsuccessfully contested) within a philosophical commentary on the way we view images. Perfectly pitched narration (by the Israeli musician Rona Kenan) fills in crevices in the visual record, but the most eloquent testimonies are delivered by those who are mute: starving Jews gazing uncomprehendingly at the Nazi cameras, and a lovely young woman squirming with discomfort as she is forced to pose alongside a beggar.
In the end, however, the value of Ms. Hersonski’s work lies less in what is shown than in her persistent reminders of what is not. By drawing our attention repeatedly to the filmmaking process itself — staging Mr. Wist’s testimony as a re-enactment; using a whirring projector to divide reels; freezing again and again on Nazi cameramen inadvertently trapped in their own fabrications — Ms. Hersonski blatantly emphasizes the hand behind the celluloid curtain. As we leave the theater, her thesis question echoes: when there is no one left to bear witness, how far can we trust the evidence of our eyes alone?
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/08/18...tml?ref=movies