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A Film Unfinished

Nicholas Jahr
September 10, 2010

by Nicholas Jahr

Given a limited release to near limitless praise, Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a documentary. In May 1942, several hundred thousand Jews had been penned within the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto for a year and a half; the first mass deportation was only two months away. Perhaps with this in mind, the Nazis dispatched a team of cameramen to film life in the ghetto. The raw footage they shot, never compiled into a finished film, is the subject of Hersonski’s doc.

I confess that the first time I watched A Film Unfinished, I found it infuriating. It seemed too glib, too fast-and-loose. As I struggled with the material that had been so frustrating, I decided I needed to watch the film again. The second time around it struck me as a skillful, challenging look at memory and film and truth and the abyss, one whose complications the director herself may not always do justice to.

“The cinematic deception was forgotten, and the black and white images remained, engraved as historical truth.” Hersonski speaks these words in voiceover early in the film, describing how the Nazi cameramen’s footage became recognized as a more or less documentary record of the ghetto. Frustratingly, she fails to cite any of the scholars or films that relied on it as such. While the conclusion that the Nazis intended the film as propaganda is about as safe assumptions get, few if any records of the project existed, and the camermen all went to ground after the war.

Heinz Auerswald was the Commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto, one of those replaceable war criminals who mostly went untouched following the allied victory. After the Eichmann trial, when the West German state started prosecuting the Nazi middle management, Auerswald was apparently placed under investigation. As part of this inquiry, Willy Wist, the only one of the Nazi cameramen to be identified, was interviewed.

The voiceover informs us that a transcript of the interview was prepared. As we’re told this, we see a tape being prepped on a recorder, and then we watch two men seemingly reenacting this interview. Whether we’re watching Wist, or watching an actor and hearing Wist’s voice, or watching an actor who’s reading Wist’s words from a transcript, or perhaps a recording, or whether the entire sequence is to some extent fabricated—the film offers us few means by which to orient ourselves in relation to this material.

If anything, Hersonski seems determined to disorient the viewer. At the climax of A Film Unfinished, we’re shown footage from the ghetto in which Wist is caught on camera: the elusive cameraman, captured and implicated. The film freezes on that split-second still of Wist, and then fades to black. The ‘lights’ come back up on the image of ‘Wist’ in the ‘present.’ Interestingly, I had remembered this as a dissolve from the face of the ‘younger’ Wist to that of the ‘elder’—which would forge a much stronger identification between the two—but the sequence of images still suggests we should view them as the same man. On first viewing, this was maddening. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it couldn’t possibly be accidental.

Hersonski goes to great lengths in her treatment of Wist to remind viewers of the way the image is manufactured and raise questions about what it is we’re watching. It’s as if Wist’s already hesitant, exculpatory account of history is receding before our very eyes behind her representations of it. Her treatment of the Nazi footage mirrors her approach to Wist; she shows us the alternate takes; we hear accounts from contemporary diaries of how the cameramen manipulated the scenes they shot. Questions about reliability and authenticity inevitably arise, but the answers are not simply a matter of “cinematic deception.”

For authenticity, Hersonski invokes the authority of the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto themselves, filming a handful of those remaining as they watch the footage. “They wanted to be the last to comment on the silent images, for they were there,” Hersonski writes in the documentary’s press packet. I wish she’d said as much in the film—the survivors are introduced without explanation, and watching their reactions to the more brutal images is painful. Which is part of the point: Hersonski overcomes the terrible familiarity of images of skeletal, imprisoned Jews and mass graves by interposing the reactions of those who were actually there. Watching the survivors watching the film, the toll is no longer abstract. To bear witness, she reopens the wound.

“Wherever did one see a flower,” one of the survivors asks the Nazi footage. “One would have eaten the flower.” Even as this drives home the degradation, it isn’t the final word on whether a wealthy family might have occasionally enjoyed flowers (whether smuggled in from outside the walls or taken from one of the gardens planted inside the ghetto).

“They are filming both the luxury and the extreme poverty,” Adam Czerniakov, head of the Judenrat, observed in his diary, an impression confirmed by Wist’s account. And yet, as another one of the survivors acknowledges, the rich (“like Czerniakov”) were able to buy food until nearly the very end. When the Jews were forced into the ghetto, they were allowed to bring some of their possessions; the wealthy were able to retain resources the poor were not, and to trade those resources for goods, services, and sometimes even other considerations from the Nazis.

Much is made of a ‘ball’ the Nazis staged in one of the ghetto’s cafes. As the footage of the ball flickers past, Hersonski plays a dim strain of music and cocktail chatter in the background, using her command of technique to reinforce the ‘reality’ of the scene. And yet even if the particular event was staged, the cafes were pre-existing sets, and were indeed frequented by the relatively wealthy. For a time (and for a price) they were able to enjoy decent food and performances by poets, singers, actors, and dancers. The ways in which the Nazis used class distinctions to their own ends were repulsive, but it doesn’t mean those distinctions didn’t exist.

That the Nazi cameramen shot multiple takes “demolishes the truth claims of those images” (that’s Manhola Dargis in the Times) strikes me as a facile argument (see long-running debates on the work of Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, et al). More convincing is the staging of a performance and the audience forced to laugh or suffer the consequences, how the paintings and charts in Czerniakov’s office were replaced with a nine-armed candelabra, a street scene in which relatively well-dressed passerby were directed to ignore those wasting away at their feet. But as one of the survivors acknowledges, many did ignore the dead and dying. How could they not? Who could blame them?

It’s as if the Nazis produced a ‘true’ film despite themselves. Or perhaps that’s why it was abandoned. (It can’t be chalked up to any subversive intent on the part of the cameramen, as ‘Wist’ tells his interrogator that he and his colleagues were, of course, only following orders: “We didn’t have a chance to express ourselves.”) Of course the footage isn’t the entire truth of the Warsaw Ghetto—Oneg Shabbat is nowhere in evidence, and certainly there were those who did not turn their heads.

“How could an image, shot from the point of view of the perpetrator, truly reflect the reality of its victim?” Hersonski asks in the press notes. Watching footage of bodies tumbling into a mass grave, it’s difficult (though not impossible) to imagine how one could see this any other way. It is only an unflattering, partial truth, to be sure, but the fact that much of it was staged doesn’t make it entirely a deception. “We aspired to present the whole truth,” wrote Emmanuel Ringelblum, “as bitter as it may be.” Hersonski quotes those words in the film, and the finished print lives up to them.

A Film Unfinished is in the last weekend of its run at New York’s Film Forum. See it while you can.

Nicholas Jahr is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn and a member of Jewish Currents’ editorial board. In the past he has written for the magazine about comics, film, the diaspora, Israeli elections, and Palestinian nonviolence. His work has appeared in the International New York Times, The Nation, City & State, and the Village Voice (RIP).