A Film Unfinished

City Paper Grade: A

by Cindy Fuchs

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: A ] 

Again and again in A Film Unfinished, faces turn to the camera. Most belong to residents of the Warsaw ghetto, looking back at the Nazis filming them in May 1942. Preserved in a 62-minute project titled Das Ghetto, today they're both haunted and haunting, their skin stretched tight and their eyes unavoidable. Like so many faces in so many documentaries, these indicate the subjects' awareness of their role. They are also silent, like all of Das Ghetto, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film discovered in an East German vault during the 1950s.

Yael Hersonski's film reassembles that footage, some observational and some staged by a German film crew, accompanied by readings from diaries and transcripts, and shots of ghetto survivors watching that footage. These shots serve as vivid reflections of our own experience, as the survivors are horrified by what they see. "Do you see the garbage?" asks one woman as she looks at a huge mass of waste. "People threw their garbage out the windows because they were too weak to go down the stairs." These and other scenes reveal the Third Reich as "an empire infatuated with the camera," narrates Israeli musician Rona Kenan. "[It] knew so well to document its own evil, passionately, systematically, like no other nation before it."

This infatuation is visible everywhere in A Film Unfinished, which sorts through memories, inaccuracies and images without clear contexts, to produce a discomfort more resonant than that of "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity" that led the MPAA to give the documentary an unusual R rating. Hersonski's film insists on the constructedness of all films, fiction and documentary — hers as well as the Nazis' — which makes truth a process of recollection and interpretation at all stages, from shooting to assembling to consuming.

Nazi cameraman Willy Wist remembers shooting victims assembled at a graveyard, anticipating their end. Imagining what that's like makes A Film Unfinished so daunting, so astute and so memorable.