Movie Review: A Film Unfinished

LITTLE ROCK — We shouldn’t be surprised at mankind’s capacity for cruelty. Our history is written in blood, and what we call news is largely the exposure of bureaucratic hypocrisy. Even relatively benign governments routinely lie to their citizens.

And we lie to each other as well, sometimes without meaning to. (As the poet Donald Rumsfeld succinctly put it, there are things we don’t know we don’t know.) For nearly 50 years, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film called Das Ghetto was taken as an accurate reflection of life among the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The footage was shot in May1942 by a film crew in Wehrmacht uniforms. They were under orders to produce a documentary about Jewish “folk” ways and life in the ghetto. For 30 days the Germans filmed scenes in the ghetto. Then they abruptly left, but their film was never processed or exhibited.

In 1954, four reels - representing about 60 minutes of footage - were discovered in a vault in East Germany. The silent film - labeled Das Ghetto - had no titles or credits, and seemed a transparent attempt to paint an idyllic picture of life for the wealthiest denizens of the ghetto - where nearly halfa-million Polish Jews were crowded into a 3-square-mile area while awaiting deportation to the camps.

The film showed elite Jewish families living in comfort - luxury even - while ignoring the others who were suffering. Random scenes showed Jewish families ignoring children begging outside shops, dancing at a ball and apparently oblivious to bodies stacked on the streets. Jewish ruthlessness and selfishness seemed to be the point of the exercise; the Nazis seemed to want to demonstrate that the horrors of the ghetto were self-inflicted.

For years filmmakers and academics extracted scenes from Das Ghetto - usually the most horrific ones - to make their own points about the human potential for atrocity.

And then in 1998, a Britishfilmmaker looking in a U.S. Air Force base archive for footage from the 1936 Olympics found two additional reels of Das Ghetto. This additional 30 minutes of outtakes demonstrated the Germans had repeatedly staged many of the scenes, and that even the most random-appearing depictions of misery were stage-managed. The same year, a cameraman on the project, Willy Wist, was tracked down and interviewed by German authorities.

A somewhat reluctant Wist - he knew nothing about how his superiors intended to use the film - appears in A Film Unfinished, a remarkably precise deconstruction of the Das Ghetto footage by Israeli television editor and director Yael Hersonski, whose grandmother survived the ghetto.

Hersonski’s purpose is analysis, clarification and a counterbalancing - if not outright refutation - of the persistent, nasty myth of Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust. And this much she accomplishes, by the careful, measured use of survivor interviews and documentary annotation. She seems to understand that the Nazi cameras couldn’t help but capture some of the truth of the ghetto - and that at times it’s impossible to discern the “intentions of the propagandist” in some of Das Ghetto’s obliterating images.

Yet, in deconstructing propaganda, the filmmaker can’t help but engage with some propagandist techniques herself. Every film is an argument, every frame is open to interpretation. Hersonski’s film is best understood as a kind of cinematic poem, with its own oblique power, rather than the final solution to the riddle. We have seen the monstrous “how” manifested many times before - no one has yet explained the “why.”