Melbourne International Film Festival: Had director Yael Hersonski only intended for her wrenching documentary A Film Unfinished to remind us of the scale of human suffering that defines the persecution of the European Jew at the hands of the genocidal Nazi regime, she would have accomplished her aim with an astonishing degree of skill and empathy.
But her film also fascinates as meditation on the very nature of cinema; of how images captured with a specific intent can be manipulated and of how the importance of a single frame of film lies in the discovery of its greatest worth.
The might of the German propaganda movement, and the role cinema played in Adolf Hitler’s social agenda, has been widely documented. In late 1939, the Nazi command ordered a film unit to capture footage, both real and staged, of life within the recently-established Warsaw Ghetto – a walled-in 'holding pen’, overcrowded with Polish Jews who were unaware of the awful fate that would soon befall them all at the Treblinka extermination facility.
A German cameraman named William Wist oversaw a small crew who were charged with creating what is now understood to be a propaganda epic that would come to be known as 'The Ghetto’. It is believed the aim of the film was to highlight the 'savagery’ of the wealthy Jews, who would dine on delicacies and hold lavish balls (all staged for Wist’s camera) while their poor countrymen died in the streets. Though ultimately the project became too ambitious a task for Wist to complete, it did result in 30 existing minutes of filmed life within the Warsaw Ghetto that was uncovered by a British filmmaker in 1998.
Hersonski exposes the awfulness of Wist’s methods by a) highlighting the treacherous means by which he exploited the Jewish fear of the SS’s daily tyranny; b) narrating passages of her film with segments from the diary of Adam Czerniakow, the Jewish Ghetto liaison officer who experienced first-hand the manipulation of reality by the German 'documentarians’ and; c) most heartbreakingly, capturing the reactions of Ghetto survivors as they watch Wist’s film for the first time.
Intercutting seamlessly, Hersonski has crafted a historical document of intense emotional resonance but one that will be terribly difficult for some viewers to experience. Silent stretches of footage that capture the mass grave burials of starved Jewish corpses, and the impact the scenes have on the now-elderly Ghetto survivors, is devastating to watch. The indifference to human suffering on display and the manifestation of the hardships of Ghetto living (including skin-and-bone children and the dead laying for days on the cobblestone pavements where they fell) is harrowing.
Yet is it fascinating when one gauges the sense of retribution that accompanies the screening of Wist’s images. These frames were meant to condemn and deride the Jewish population but can now be used to honour them. One of the most compelling and satisfying aspects of the film is knowing that the filmmaker is having his work turned against him; that a documentarian like Hersonski can invert the evilness of Wist’s intention and use his images to honour those he consorted to destroy.
One must not let a cinephilic obsession undermine the essence of Hersonski’s work – A Film Unfinished is most importantly a remembrance of lost souls, another vital condemnation of the German atrocities of World War II. But it is also a film that symbolically allows the survivors and their families to seize their captor’s weapon of choice – the movie camera – and point it back in their faces. Though sad, solemn and respectful, there is also a joyous sense of justice that closes out Hersonski’s remarkable movie.
