A Film Unfinished
Dir: Yael Hersonski
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Oscilloscope Pictures
90 Minutes
Non-fiction approaches to the Holocaust often seem spurious beyond the genre’s two monoliths: Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Resnais’ film, at 32 minutes, circles the event before declaring it cinematically untenable, too much raw horror to explain or even non-reductively document; Lanzmann’s attempts a full, cathartic digestion, collecting hundreds of interviews, spanning more than 10 hours in the process. The enormity of the tragedy is such that it often seems like there’s no other way to approach it, and documentary treatments regularly find themselves caught in the same sentimental trap as fictive interpretations, applying the wrong kind of deference, their mettle never quite up to the specifics of the catastrophe.
A Film Unfinished doesn’t make these mistakes, and while it may not fit into the pantheon of great films on the subject, it’s certainly a chilling, rightfully depressing reminder of the things humanity is capable of. Never mind that the sanctity of this material makes itself almost criticism proof, Yael Hersonski’s handling of the title topic, a newly recovered Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw ghetto, is grippingly strong. That the brutality of the scenes it captures has earned it an R rating seems to miss the point: its shots of bodies piled in carts or sliding into mass graves may be disturbing, but they’re essential images for a world that has not yet wiped out genocide.
These bodies are doubly significant, not only as horrifying totems of the ghetto’s living conditions, but for the decay in humanity they suggest. Jewish tradition stresses a quick burial, and the desperate sight of loved ones lying dead on the curb, like trash waiting for pickup, is even more sickening because of the forced malaise it suggests. It stands in great contrast to the false depictions the Nazis were filming at the same time, which inserted fictional scenes of lavish dinner parties and society functions, attempting to cast the ghetto in the image of the rest of the world, strictly divided between rich and poor.
The point of the original film, found in storage in 1998, labeled only as ‘the ghetto,’ seems to be to prop up vicious stereotypes: that Jews were greedy, that rumors of the horrors within the ghetto’s walls were a consequence of this greed, that their rituals were primitively cultic and weird. It’s depressing stuff, and Hersonski contrasts it with human footage of survivors watching the film, their commentary contextualizing these images. One tells of tripping over a body in the street, finding herself face to face with one of the corpses she had previously managed to ignore. This encounter broke down a wall, and the flow of images here has a similar effect, challenging complacency, reminding us of the shattering enormity of the event.
What ultimately makes A Film Unfinished so good is not its moral insistence, completely valid but well-worn territory, but the clash between fact and fiction that it presents. It’s a reminder that the truth of an event often hides behind a screen of misinformation, one that draws uneasy comparisons to conflicts both past and present.
by Jesse Cataldo
