Review of A Film Unfinished (2010) by Luisfelipe Z — 06 Sep 2011

"A Film Unfinished" is a top-notch documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto, or more exactly, a Jewish attempt to understand how the Nazis were trying to portray it by inspecting the reels of an unfinished film the Nazis shot over a few weeks before they started sending the surviving Jews to the death camp of Treblinka.

Filmmaker Yael Hersonski successfully tries not to make the cryptic reels mean more than they say. What the Nazis' motivations were remains partly obscure, though by examining various takes of the same staged scene, by listening to the reactions of modern ghetto survivors to the film, and by collating the images with the diaries of the head of the Warsaw Jewish council and the dramatised post-war interviews of one of the German cameramen, one can get an inkling of what was going on.

Viewers expecting an exhaustive look at the Warsaw Ghetto might be disappointed, though. This is just a slice of life (and death), with no thorough presentation of the historical context: how the ghetto exactly came to be, what its economics was, etc. The comments by survivors are also very sparse. I was surprised, for instance, to see Jews go to a ritual bath with dirty feet. Is it something they would normally do? I suspect not. And isn't ritual bathing individual? Weren't the women supposed to bathe their whole body? And weren't they, therefore, deliberately undermining the documentary and fooling the cameramen with this mockery of Jewish ritual? One of the survivors also explains that Jews are normally not buried in coffins, but does not say what they are buried in. I wonder whether the documentary itself was not leaving all these questions unanswered in order to cultivate the indeterminacy and remain itself "A Film Unfinished".

The documentary works extremely well as a brutal portrait of the Nazi persecution of the Jews (with very painful images of starving children and a mass burial), a reflection on the use of film in propaganda, and a bold attempt to understand the Nazi mind. I highly recommend it.