A picture is worth a thousand words

By Elana Dure and Meira Davidowitz

Issue of August 27, 2010/ 17 Elul 5770

For a few months, the Nazis filmed different aspects of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. They planned to use this footage as propaganda, however, the film was never completed or utilized. Instead, the film remained neglected on a shelf, collecting dust, bearing the words “The Ghetto.”

“A Film Unfinished,” a documentary by the Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, released this week, showcases the Nazi’s unfinished film as well as various outtakes from the film with comments by survivors of the ghetto.

The Warsaw Ghetto, established in 1940, is mainly known for the uprising against the Nazis. However the ghetto istelf was also a miniature metropolis for the 400,000 Jews that were crowded into the less than three square mile area. In the footage shot by the Nazis, the Nazis staged elaborate parties and banquets for the few rich Jews and then filmed images of poorer Jews in ramshackle apartments and general squalor. The contrast was intended to show the Jews’ callousness towards each other. “A Film Unfinished” shows how the Nazis staged these events, when in reality, as a survivor says in the film, there were only 20-50 wealthy Jews. The actual Nazi film had no sound, so Hersonski provides her own soundtrack: the voice of survivors of the ghetto explaining their day-to-day lives. Part of the film is also spent watching survivors watch the Nazi footage for themselves. Usually, the survivors’ eyes widen, not so much in horror but in recognition of what they’ve tried to forget.

If nothing else, the film reveals the clouded truths of what life was like in the Ghetto. Parts of the Nazi documentary were pure fiction; other parts were abridged truths.

70 years later the footage is still striking, though not for the reasons the Nazis intended. Using modern-day effects, Hersonski zooms in on the faces of those suffering inside the ghetto. In one image, she pans across the face of a lone bystander, his face gaunt with hunger, contorted with the pain of life in the ghetto.

After all is said and done, the film ends just as it began: in the archives, a room of endless shelves of forgotten footage.

“A Film Unfinished” will be showing at the Lincoln Plaza and the Film Forum in

Manhattan beginning on Aug. 18.