A Film Unfinished (Monday, September 6, 2010) (115)

Yael Herzonski's A Film Unfinished is an interesting film, but not something all that fabulous. It is a documentary about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in May 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Herzonski shows clips from that film and then adds to it journals and first-hand accounts by some of the Jews who witnessed the filming first-hand. She then also shows survivors of the Ghetto and the camps watching the footage and reacting to it. All of these documents help to show us how the people lived and how the Nazis clearly exaggerated simple situations or staged fake ones to make a political point. This is a documentary about a documentary.

One thing we see clearly here is how desperately hungry the people in the Ghetto were and how the Nazis rather brazenly brushed past this fact. Historians over the years have known full well that this Warsaw documentary was a propaganda piece and that much of what we see was not nearly the truth. What Herzonski's research shows - and especially what the interviews with survivors show - is that even basic scenes of Jews going to a restaurant for a nice lunch were also pure fabrications. The survivors joke about how nobody went out to eat at restaurants because there was just simply no food to be found in the Ghetto. Not only that, but the interiors were much shabbier than what the Nazi's present. One man jokes about how nobody would have had a vase of flowers on a table because they would have eaten the flowers!

I always appreciate a critical analysis of the documentary form - I think it's one of the most compelling topics in film theory. The idea that a movie exists as a "non-fiction document" is an absolute red herring, allowing lousy and lazy technicians get away with all sorts of formal transgressions from outright propaganda and polemic to simply cheating with framing. All film - all art - is clearly subjective and subject to any number of outside influences. This film shows how even accepting the Nazi film as a propaganda piece doesn't mean that we fully understand the truth on the ground entirely. She shows how there are deeper levels of meaning to any single image.

As interesting as this dissection is, Herzonski's film is not really all that interesting or compelling. I think most Holocaust films play too strongly on our human emotions and reactions and I think the director sometimes lets our natural visceral reactions rule over a stronger insight. Basically, I think most films about the Holocaust are intellectually cheap and emotionally easy. The digging into the truth about the original film is lightly interesting, but it doesn't go incredibly deep with further questions. This could have been an effective doc short and I think it doesn't pull off the significance of a full feature.

Stars: 2.5 of 4