a film unfinished analysis

Mon, 08/09/2010

'A Film Unfinished,' A History Unveiled

Editor's Note: Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished airs Tuesday, May 3, on PBS' Independent Lens . The following article was published last August in conjunction with the film's theatrical premiere.

A Film Unfinished takes audiences on a journey back some 68 years in time to life in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. The film was conceived, written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, who has artfully blended archival footage taken by German cameramen as content for a Nazi propaganda film with images of a handful of survivors sharing painful memories of the Holocaust.

The 89-minute documentary was produced by Belfilms LTD with the support of the New Israel Foundation for Cinema and Television, Yad Vashem Project and YES Docu. It earned the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Best International Documentary Feature Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival earlier this year. The documentary was subsequently picked up for theatrical distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Hersonski began her career as a freelance director and editor after graduating from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2003. She subsequently edited a weekly documentary program that aired on Channel 10 in Israel. A Film Unfinished was her first turn at the helm during production of a feature-length documentary.

The Warsaw ghetto came into being after the German army invaded and occupied Poland in April 1940. More than 400,000 Jewish people who lived in Warsaw were forced to live in a walled ghetto that occupied less than three square miles. Countless numbers of them and more than 200,000 refugees who were brought to the ghetto, died of starvation, typhus and other diseases. Most survivors were sent to almost certain death at Treblinka and other concentration camps.

a film unfinished analysis

An hour's worth of film footage was discovered in an East German archive at the end of World War II, with the title Das Ghetto written on the cans. The black-and-white film was produced by German cameramen who were brought to the ghetto in May 1942. During the 1960s, a German historian, who was doing research about the ghetto in a Polish archive, found an entry permit given to a German cameraman named Willy Wist. In 1998, Adrian Wood, a British researcher, was looking for footage from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in a vault on a US Air Force base in Germany, and he noticed two film cans on the floor titled Das Ghetto . Wood had years of experience with Holocaust footage, and what he had found was multiple outtakes of scenes where German cameraman and S.S. guards accidentally got into backgrounds while other people were shooting. That film provided tangible evidence that scenes of Jews living the high life were staged propaganda.

" A Film Unfinished emerged out of my preoccupation with the notion of the perpetrators of war crimes creating an archive that testifies to the suffering of their victims," Hersonski says. "The systematic documentation of these horrors has changed forever how the past is archived. These images have been used in many films. In the worst cases, they have been presented as straight-forward historical truth."

In 2006, Hersonski wrote a short essay outlining her ideas for a documentary and submitted it to Noemi Schory, an experienced film producer in Israel. That was less than a year after Schory had completed her work on the new Visual Center at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, which includes more than 100 short films that use archival footage. Schory told Hersonski about a diary written by a 15-year-old girl, which describes a German camera crew making a propaganda film in the ghetto.

About a month later, Hersonski traveled to Jerusalem to watch a copy of the 62-minute rough cut of the Nazi propaganda film that was never released. "After so many years of being bombarded with films about the Holocaust, I was shocked that I didn't know anything about this film," she says. "Until you see it, you can't understand the evil behind its making, and the distorted ways it was used in dozens of documentaries after the war. I asked myself, How can a propaganda film shot from the point of view of the perpetrators of a crime truly reflect the realities facing the victims?"

Hersonski traveled to Berlin to meet the archivists and learn more about the history of the footage. She discovered that approximately 90 percent of the film created by the Nazis was destroyed during the last days of the war. No documents were found revealing who initiated the propaganda film and why it wasn't completed.

Schory and Itay Ken-Tor, a producer/director, who has been worked at Belfilms since 2000 and managed the organization for the past three years, came on board as producers. Hersonski credits a "persistent" Israeli researcher for finding nine survivors of the crimes committed in the Warsaw ghetto. They were teenagers or younger during the war, and they now lived in Israel, England, Poland and the United States. She contacted them and asked if they would be willing to be filmed sharing memories and their thoughts while watching film found in the archives. "I explained in detail what they were going to see, and asked if they were absolutely certain they could stand the shock," Hersonski says. "I was relieved that five of them were more than willing to come. After every session, I was physically numb and mentally worn out. The four women who were filmed watching and commenting on the archival footage live in Israel. The only man [among the five participating survivors] died last year."

Willy Wist, one of the German cameramen who were brought to Warsaw to shoot Das Ghetto , also agreed to share his memories. He had been called to testify when the West German government prosecuted war criminals during the 1960s. "We had no idea of what was happening until we arrived," he recalls in the film. "The thought that these people would be systematically murdered never entered my mind. The SS brought us Jews whom they wanted us to film. We could see the fear on their faces." After 30 days, the film crews packed their gear and left.

A Film Unfinished ranges from close-in shots of faces of starving adults and children to a staged scene in a restaurant where waiters are carrying trays stacked with food to show the world the paradise that rich Jews lived in. There are haunting close-ups of the faces of the survivors and Wist sitting in a darkened cinema, sharing their feelings as they watch images projected on the screen-such as people desperately searching for food in piles of trash at a garbage dump, while one of the survivors recalls doing that when she was ten years old. In another scene, Wist reminisces about filming a staged shot of an attractive woman looking in a mirror as she applies lipstick; shots like that one were designed to contrast with film of a shabbily dressed woman walking on the street, carrying her baby and begging for bread. Itai Neeman, an Israeli cinematographer, heightens the drama with intuitively sensitive composition and use of light and darkness playing on the faces and eyes.

a film unfinished analysis

The man whom the Nazis had appointed director of the Jewish Council was filmed sitting at his desk looking like a corporate executive. He obeyed the Nazis, but wrote entries in his diary expressing his feelings. Other people risked their lives by documenting history as it was happening, in their diaries-some of which, including the one maintained by the council director, were also found in archives. Hershonski had a narrator verbally punctuate images by reading appropriate words selected from the diaries. "A time will come when no survivors are left," she says. "The archival footage, unlike paper documents, bears a much more layered testimony regarding the realities it witnesses. It will remain as our source of understanding our history. The film will testify to the crimes that were committed and the suffering of the victims."

On August 5, despite appeals by Oscilloscope Laboratory president Adam Yauch, Hersonski and Hanna Abrusky, one of the survivors who appears in the film, the MPAA classification and ratings appeals board upheld an "R" rating for A Film Unfinished. The reason given was that the film contains "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity."

The "graphic nudity" is a brief shot of a few naked men and women separately stepping into a pool, which the narrator describes as a ritual Jewish bath. It is a graphic example of how the Nazis staged shots designed to denigrate Jewish people.

Yauch argued to the MPAA that it is important for young people to see A Film Unfinished to learn a valuable history lesson. As George Santayana wrote in 1905, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

“The MPAA "R" rating is extremely unfortunate,” says Oscilloscope Laboratories co-founder David Fenkel. "Yael has created a really powerful film that has important educational value for people of all ages…especially young people who aren’t familiar with the history. We are still uncovering layers of history of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. This documentary provides an extremely unique and fresh perspective of what the Nazis did in terms of media manipulation.

“It’s disheartening that the MPAA has decided to make it difficult for young people to experience this film,” Fenkel continues. “It's really crazy, because there are films with extreme violence and sex that get PG-13 ratings, but apparently it’s okay to censor history. Sure, some of the images in this film are not easy to watch, but a lot of truth isn't necessarily easy to watch. We should leave the choice up to the parent and teachers who believe that it is important to educate children. The realities of an “R” rating make it more difficult. But, I believe this film is good and important enough to get a wide audience. I believe this story about World War II is going to become a topic of conversation this year and for years to come.”

A Film Unfinished opens August 18 in New York City and August 20 in Los Angeles.

Bob Fisher has been writing about documentary and narrative filmmaking for nearly 40 years, mainly focusing on cinematography and preservation.

a film unfinished analysis

REVIEW | Manipulating the Past: “A Film Unfinished”

Review | manipulating the past: "a film unfinished".

Aug 18, 2010 2:38 am

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The popular sentiment about Holocaust grief at the movies reached a breaking point in 2008, when backlash against “The Reader” suggested that audiences had grown tired of the predetermined gravitas that seemed to infuse such stories with an immediate sense of purpose. Last year, Yoav Shamir’s perceptive documentary “Defamation” put an additional focus on the problem by following school children on a guilt-inducing field trip to Auschwitz. The kids are meant to accept the morbidity and cry for the dead rather than try to understand the forces behind their fate. Shamir rose a boldly progressive question: Does acknowledging a dark patch of history necessitate the mournful tone? Can our relationship to the past evolve under the scrutiny available to us in the present?

With “ A Film Unfinished ,” Yael Hersonski presents a solution, setting the stage for a cinematic filtration of Holocaust grief through empirical analysis. The Israeli director unearths the full story behind a long-neglected propaganda film that spent decades in an East German archive, where it was vaguely titled “Ghetto.” The hour long fragments actually belonged to an uncompleted 1942 production intended to present the Warsaw Ghetto as a place of immense luxury, where affluent Jews not only played into their ugliest stereotypes but flaunted them.

History obviously tells us that this was not the case, but Hersonski proves it: Using outtakes from the project, the memories of survivors and the diary of the beleaguered head of the Jewish Council, she carefully unravels the production’s manipulative intent. Her technique displays the skill of a masterful archivist rather than filmmaker, but “A Film Unfinished” certainly holds its own as a unique cinematic experience.

“From the frenzy of propaganda, the images alone remain,” Hersonski says in the voice-over that guides the movie. Indeed, the majority of the its hypnotic effect comes from the silent dread apparent in the eyes of the ghetto’s Jewish residents, seen both in their true impoverished forms and when tidied up for the camera. Shot in 30 days by a group of Nazi filmmakers, the production appears to take Joseph Goebbels’s ambitions to experimental heights. Whereas “instructional” propaganda like “The Eternal Jew” created a laundry list of reasons to justify the prevalence of anti-Semitism, the ghetto film remains eternally unformed, leaving an unpolished contrast between the reality of ghetto life and the lies that the cameramen aimed to perpetrate. Hersonski’s ability to bring this juxtaposition to light gives her movie an unprecedented outlook on the persecution that took place within the walls of the ghetto.

Her narrative is impressively constructed with more layers than even the unfinished film in question (appropriately enough, it won the editing award at Sundance). Among them: Excerpts from Jewish Council head Adam Cherniakov’s diaries, read in their original Polish, provide an essential primary source to accompany the footage. Five survivors watch clips in a screening room, picking through familiar faces and locales. An actor portrays one of the cameramen, performing dialogue from the transcript of an interview conducted with him after the war. There’s no doubting the profound depths of Hersonski’s research, and her brilliant capacity to assemble this material into a coherent narrative.

Unfortunately, her approach is susceptible to redundancies. Survivors continually shield their eyes and long-dead Jews wander the streets time and again, which occasionally normalizes the grim mood rather than giving it power. The one missing piece is the modern perspective — contemporary images of Warsaw that could have helped place the events in the context of the real world.

The strongest moments in “A Film Unfinished” arrive when Hersonski breaks down the methodology of the production, revealing multiple takes and evidence of directorial intent. The actors’ feigned comfort masks their misery, implying a form of desperation as harrowing as anything in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Saló” and certainly far more discomfiting than the imaginary concentration camps in “Schindler’s List” (at least those scenes ease the pain with steady camerawork).

Hersonski’s scholarly approach makes it less engaging on an emotional level, taking a step toward the measured approach endorsed by Shamir and others. However, it suffers from an issue at the opposite end of the spectrum from histrionic Holocaust fictionalizations: The dreariness makes the movie into a resolutely cold affair, and it’s difficult to identify with any particular victim’s anguish. But at least she enables viewers to acknowledge it.

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This Article is related to: Reviews and tagged A Film Unfinished , In Theaters

'Film Unfinished' Reveals Nazi Horrors, Manipulation

A Film Unfinished is a provocative and disturbing film about an hour of incomplete Nazi footage shot in the infamous Warsaw ghetto in 1942. That footage was discovered without sound or credits in a concrete vault hidden in a forest. It was clearly the rough first draft of a Nazi propaganda film, but as the years went on clips from that footage were considered trustworthy enough to find their way into various Holocaust documentaries. In 1998, another reel was discovered that reveals how manipulated and stage key parts of the original film were.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

"A Film Unfinished" is a film about a film. It's a piece of Nazi propaganda from the Second World War. Israeli director Yael Hersonski has released a critical analysis of the notorious footage.

MORNING EDITION film critic Kenneth Turan has this review.

KENNETH TURAN: "A Film Unfinished" is a provocative and disturbing film about an hour of incomplete Nazi footage shot in the infamous Warsaw ghetto in May, 1942. That footage was discovered without sound or credits in a concrete vault hidden in a forest. It was clearly the rough first draft of a Nazi propaganda film, but as the years went on, clips from that footage were considered trustworthy enough to find their way into various Holocaust documentaries.

Then, in 1998, a reel of outtakes was discovered, as well, outtakes that revealed how nakedly manipulated and meticulously staged key parts of the original film were. One reason to show the original film, here presented in its entirety, is because its authentic parts are not like other Holocaust footage.

These scenes are not shot in concentration camps. They show ordinary city streets turned into nightmarish ghettos. Squeezing half a million Jews into the three square miles of Warsaw led to almost unimaginable poverty and despair. The beggars in rags, the starving people dying on the streets, the sick and destitute living in squalor - these were all too real.

The Nazis, obviously, were not interested in a film that emphasized Jewish suffering. They wanted to contrast this pain with the alleged callous indifference of better-off Jews. Only there were no better-off Jews, which is where the Nazi fakery and manipulation came in.

(Soundbite of tape reel)

(Soundbite of beeping)

TURAN: Outtakes show that key scenes were staged over and over again from multiple angles, including shots of Jews putting on evening dress to go to champagne banquets.

Unidentified Woman: (German spoken)

TURAN: One scene involves a dinner with flowers on the table.

TURAN: A present-day survivor of the ghetto was shown watching it, and remarks...

TURAN: We would have eaten the flowers.

"A Film Unfinished" does more than show us horrors. It's a forceful reminder of the multiple ways the documentary form can be manipulated, of how nominally real footage can be turned to anyone's purposes in the blink of an eye.

WERTHEIMER: Kenneth Turan reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and the Los Angeles Times.

Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Review: a film unfinished.

Whereas Nazi films aimed to obscure the dividing line between fact and fiction, A Film Unfinished aims at clarification, at analysis.

A Film Unfinished

If, as critic and filmmaker Dai Vaughan writes, the “documentary response”—the perception of the image as “signifying what it appears to record”—lies principally in the reaction of the viewer, then the Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw ghetto discovered in East German vaults after the war succeeded in eliciting just this response from historians and film scholars who for years took the material as a reliable document of historical veracity. For Vaughan, the recorded image always has a documentary as well as a fictional function, but the ethical task of the documentarian is to the foreground the artifice in such a way that the viewer doesn’t take for reality an image that contradicts the essential “truth” of the film’s subject. Of course such designations as “reality” are notoriously slippery and even the most “verité” of movies is filled with directorial manipulations that shade the project toward fiction. But it’s only in the work of the propagandist that these categories become deliberately confused, the filmmaker attempting to confuse the viewer into taking for truth the patently false.

All of which makes the Nazi film titled simply The Ghetto , a project that mixes obviously staged scenes showing Jews living the high life with seemingly “documentary” glimpses of the most abject misery, such a fascinating object of study. In A Film Unfinished , director Yael Hersonski takes the propaganda movie as her text, annotating ample footage from the work with the verbal reactions of a handful of the ghetto’s survivors, readings from diaries, journals, and official documents of the time and the testimony of one of the filmmakers who worked on the project.

Shot over 30 days in May 1942, the footage that survives is a strange hybrid whose final purpose is difficult to fully discern. Certainly staged scenes in which Jews enjoy a meal at an upscale restaurant or arrange flowers in a posh apartment (“Where did you ever see a flower?” one survivor comments. “We could eat a flower.”) serve their propagandist purpose, as do their inverse, perversions of Jewish rituals, as when a man performs a brutal circumcision at home instead of at a hospital or emaciated men and buxom women are forced to take a nude ritual bath. But why, then, does the film contain such haunting images as reeking piles of garbage clogging up residential courtyards or a shot of bearded beggar man in rags walking down the street, a bubble of nitrate deterioration creating an ambiguous halo around his head? As the film’s narrator puts it, the “intentions of the propagandist” remain oblique.

But two discoveries helped shed light on the original filmmakers’ process. The first was the uncovering in the 1960s of the name of one of the cameraman, Willy Wist, who was tracked down and forced to testify about his filmmaking methods. The second was the discovery, in 1998, of 30 minutes of outtakes from The Ghetto which revealed the degree to which the Nazis deliberately staged many of the film’s scenes, even those that seemed to be little more than random exposés of misery, a process that Hersonski explores by showing us several takes of the same “scene.” But just as all documentary contains some element of fiction, so there is often an element of documentary truth in narrative and no matter how carefully the filmmakers orchestrated the dumping of horrendously thinned bodies into mass graves, the footage tells us plenty about the state of the ghetto. It’s when the viewer can no longer tell the difference between obvious lies and hard facts that the deliberate confusions of the Nazi filmmakers succeed and the documentary response becomes problematic.

No less a shrewd manipulator than the German directors she set out to expose, Hersonski uses her editing console to tweak the footage to suit her purposes, as when she freeze-frames on an image of a man digging through garbage to highlight the pathos of a face peeking out from a discarded photograph. And like the Nazi filmmakers, she freely stages recreations, oblique simulations of a typewriter pounding out an important document or Willy Wist being interrogated, sequences whose main purpose seems to be to vary the film’s visual look, but whose slick desaturated look clashes unproductively with the footage from the propaganda film. Finally, Hersonski is, if anything, more emotionally manipulative than the Germans, staging a final sequence in which she cuts from The Ghetto ’s most horrifying sequence—the mass dumping of bodies—to extreme close-ups of the survivors’ faces. But even if this crude, ethically suspect juxtaposition seems nearly unforgivable, Hersonski’s manipulations have the virtue of deliberate transparency. Whereas the Nazi films aimed to obscure the dividing line between fact and fiction, A Film Unfinished aims at clarification, at analysis. In true Vaughnian fashion, Hersonski foregrounds her artifice and in the process offers us a privileged look at not only a valuable archival document but at the ways in which the historical record can be manipulated as easily as a frame of film being threaded through the eager rollers of a Steenbeck.

Andrew Schenker

Andrew Schenker

Andrew Schenker is an essayist and critic living in upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler , The Village Voice , Artforum , Bookforum , The Los Angeles Review of Books , and others.

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Movie review: ‘A Film Unfinished’

Mark Twain famously said that politicians, old buildings and prostitutes become respectable with age. To that category, a provocative and disturbing new documentary claims, you can add Nazi propaganda films.

“A Film Unfinished,” directed by Yael Hersonski, focuses on about an hour of incomplete Nazi footage shot in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, just months before the ghetto was liquidated and its half a million Jewish residents sent to their deaths.

That footage, found without sound or credits, was discovered in cans labeled simply “The Ghetto” in a concrete vault hidden in a forest. Though this was clearly the rough first draft of a Nazi propaganda film, as the years went on clips from that footage were considered trustworthy enough to find their way into various Holocaust documentaries.

Then, in 1998, a reel of outtakes from “The Ghetto” was discovered as well, outtakes that revealed how nakedly manipulated and meticulously staged key parts of that film were. When Israeli director Hersonski found out about that deception, she became determined to make a documentary that dealt with the original film and the outtakes.

One reason to show the original film, here presented in its entirety, is because, as “Unfinished’s” voice-over attests, it contained devastating scenes that “required no staging.”

Squeezing half a million Jews into the 3 square miles of the Warsaw Ghetto led to almost unimaginable poverty and desolation. The beggars in pathetic rags, the starving people dying on the streets, the sick and destitute living in squalor, these make the most powerful of impressions.

Just as disturbing are the original footage’s numerous close-ups of ghetto residents, close-ups that are simply awful to look at. Living faces haunted by knowledge of a sure death, these are among the most purely despairing images ever put on screen.

As bad, if not worse, are scenes that almost beggar description. There is the horrible humiliation of forcing women to disrobe and then filming them, clearly terrified, using a mikvah, or ritual bath. And shots of the numberless corpses piled one on top of the other in the ghetto’s massive cemetery leave one speechless with despondency.

The Nazis, obviously, were not interested in a film that emphasized Jewish suffering. The aim of “The Ghetto,” as far as can be determined, was to contrast this pain with the alleged callous indifference of better-off Jews, to show, as the voice-over says, “the paradise the Jews lived in.” Only, there were no better-off Jews, let alone a paradise, which is where the Nazi fakery and manipulation came in.

Outtakes show that key scenes were staged over and over again from multiple angles. As a voice-over reading from the journals of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the ghetto’s Jewish Council, makes clear, the sequences we see of Jews putting on evening dress to go to Champagne banquets were completely fabricated. As a survivor of the ghetto laconically says on watching a dinner with flowers on the table, “We would have eaten the flowers.”

To emphasize the connections between reality and the Nazi footage, director Hersonski showed the original film to five ghetto survivors, who view the film with trepidation and growing horror. Some scenes are so difficult that even people who lived through them have trouble watching: “Today, I am human,” one woman says through tears, “today I can cry.”

One of the points of “A Film Unfinished,” which is to make you question the reliability of the documentary form, is perhaps unintentionally strengthened by one of Hersonski’s decisions.

Having unearthed a transcript of testimony by Willy Wist, one of the ghetto footage cameramen, the director chose to have an actor play Wist and reenact scenes of him being interviewed. Unless you are paying close attention, you might believe Wist was still alive and part of the film. It’s another indication of the malleability of the documentary form, of how it can be turned to anyone’s purposes in the blink of an eye.

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a film unfinished analysis

Kenneth Turan is the former film critic for the Los Angeles Times.

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A Film Unfinished

2009, Documentary, 1h 29m

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A heartbreaking, haunting historical document, A Film Unfinished excavates particularly horrible chapter of Holocaust history, and in doing so, the film provides a glimpse into the Nazi propaganda machine. Read critic reviews

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A film unfinished photos.

Israeli director Yael Hersonski examines a recently found film reel from an unfinished Nazi movie entitled "Das Ghetto" in this award-winning documentary. For decades, historians have relied on "Das Ghetto" as a portrayal of life in occupied Warsaw and this new footage provides rare insights into one of the biggest propaganda machines of all time. Hersonski uses personal journals and accounts as well as an interview with a surviving cameraman to re-examine this dark cinematic relic.

Genre: Documentary

Original Language: German

Director: Yael Hersonski

Producer: Itai Ken-Tor , Noemi Schory

Writer: Yael Hersonski

Release Date (Theaters): Aug 18, 2010 original

Release Date (Streaming): Mar 8, 2011

Box Office (Gross USA): $311.5K

Runtime: 1h 29m

Distributor: Oscilloscope Pictures

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A scene from Yael Hersonski’s “Film Unfinished,” an investigation into an incomplete Nazi propaganda movie.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Aug. 17, 2010

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.

Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, these images were subjected to a radical rereading with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged. Over and over, in multiple takes, we see well-dressed Jews enter a butcher’s shop, ignoring the children begging outside. In a similar scenario, prosperous-looking passersby are directed to disregard the corpses abandoned on the sidewalk. The propagandists’ manipulation of their half-million prisoners was now clear, even as its eventual purpose — perhaps more than just to manufacture scenes showing callousness on the part of wealthy Jews toward their less fortunate brethren — remained as murky as ever.

In “A Film Unfinished,” the Israeli director Yael Hersonski embarks on a critical analysis of “Das Ghetto” that is remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. Moving methodically reel by reel and acknowledging the “many layers of reality,” the director creates a palimpsest of impressions from multiple, meticulously researched sources representing both victims and oppressors.

Though excerpts from a taped interview with Willy Wist, one of the cameramen who worked on “Das Ghetto,” are as evasive as one might expect, other witnesses did not hold back. Readings from personal diaries, like those of Adam Cherniakov, the head of the Jewish Council (whose apartment was used by the Nazis to stage several scenes), and from the minutely detailed reports of the ghetto commissioner Heinz Auerswald, provide vivid insight into the restrictions of daily life and the methods of the Nazi filmmakers.

Carefully pairing actual scenes with the journal descriptions (the film’s editing, by Joëlle Alexis, is astonishingly exact), “A Film Unfinished” is really an exploration of watching — or, more precisely, of the difference between watching and seeing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the director’s decision to invite five survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto to view the original footage and to film their reactions.

“What if I see someone I know?” one woman asks, hardly daring to look. As the flickering atrocities play across the survivors’ faces — one film observing another — Ms. Hersonski silently creates space for memories. More than just valuable reality checks (“When did you ever see a flower? We would have eaten a flower!”), these recollections anchor the past to the present, and the images to human experience, in a way that shifts our perception of the Warsaw film. Whether cringing at the sight of naked men and women being forced at gunpoint into a ritual bath, or contemptuously dismissing the Nazis’ efforts to highlight Jewish privilege (“My mother wore her beautiful coat, and sometimes a hat. So what?”), the survivors seem to speak for those who cannot.

Moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative, “A Film Unfinished” positions familiar Holocaust horrors (the R rating was unsuccessfully contested ) within a philosophical commentary on the way we view images. Perfectly pitched narration (by the Israeli musician Rona Kenan) fills in crevices in the visual record, but the most eloquent testimonies are delivered by those who are mute: starving Jews gazing uncomprehendingly at the Nazi cameras, and a lovely young woman squirming with discomfort as she is forced to pose alongside a beggar.

In the end, however, the value of Ms. Hersonski’s work lies less in what is shown than in her persistent reminders of what is not. By drawing our attention repeatedly to the filmmaking process itself — staging Mr. Wist’s testimony as a re-enactment; using a whirring projector to divide reels; freezing again and again on Nazi cameramen inadvertently trapped in their own fabrications — Ms. Hersonski blatantly emphasizes the hand behind the celluloid curtain. As we leave the theater, her thesis question echoes: when there is no one left to bear witness, how far can we trust the evidence of our eyes alone?

“A Film Unfinished” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Brief nudity and a mass grave.

A FILM UNFINISHED

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Yael Hersonski; director of photography, Itai Neeman; edited by Joëlle Alexis; narrated by Rona Kenan; music by Isahi Adar; produced by Noemi Schory and Itay Ken-Tor; released by Oscilloscope Laboratories. In English, Hebrew, German, Polish and Yiddish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes.

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A film unfinished.

a film unfinished analysis

In 1942, the Nazi propaganda machine sent camera crews into occupied Warsaw to film life, real and not, in the walled ghetto of the city – 3 square miles housing over 500,000 Jews. The incomplete footage of the horror was found after the war and gave historians a previously unseen view, outside of Hitler’s Germany, into the Warsaw Ghetto and its condemned denizens. First time documentary film maker Yael Hersonski takes the three silent film reels (with a fourth take reel found years later), assembles it to show the terror and then dissects, for analysis, “A Film Unfinished.”

Laura's Review: B+

With “A Film Unfinished,” filmmaker Yael Hersonski accomplishes something unusual - presents a new angle on the Holocaust documentary. This film within a film is an analysis of the artform as propaganda, and while there have been other looks at this subject under the Nazi regime, most recently with "Harlan - In the Shadow of Jud Süss," no one has been able to break down the subject to the level of detail of camera angles in different takes. Hersonski also has the perspective of one of the main cameramen on the project, a man who claims to not understand the purpose of what he was shooting, while the work of another is contrasted with the aid of the personal work he did on the project. What is most surprising to me about the film, though, is the existance of wealth in the Warsaw Ghetto, a fact that more than one survivor discusses. Hersonski's voice is heard occasionally as a narrative bridge, but she largely keeps her own objectives out of the picture. The Nazis attempted to exploit a condition by exaggerating it and creating a false impression of Jewish disregard for their own, but one wishes the director had prodded some of the survivors for their own feelings on the subject.

Robin's Review: B-

Director-writer Ben Wheatley is certainly a filmmaker who follows his own creative path: “Kill List,” about a troubled hit man who gets in way over his head, and “Sightseers,” the tale of a couple on an idyllic vacation that turns to mayhem, could not be more different and unusual. But, with “A Field in England” he has walked off the map. The film begins with Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) being hunted by a nobleman, an alchemist of the dark arts, on horseback. As the noble closes in on his prey he is run through by a lancer. The fugitive is joined by three rebel deserters who make the plan to escape death and find a tavern to tie one on. Things begin to get weird when they encounter O’Neil (Michael Smiley), a commanding royalist who coerces the soldiers to dig in the field for his treasure – whatever that is. While foraging for food, one of the men stumbles upon some mushroom and he adds them to their meager stew. The mushrooms are not your garden variety and all the men begin to hallucinate, intensely. “A Field in England” is not a typical narrative. Instead, it is a series of incidents that take a surreal turn when O’Neil forces Whitehead into his tent. The air is pierced by anguished screams emanating from the tent. Then, Whitehead appears, tethered by a long rope, and slowly walks toward the soldiers with an almost demonic look on his face. We do not know what happened in the confines of the tent but it is obvious that it is not good. The story, by Wheatley and Amy Jump, consists mainly of the men talking and walking across the title field. This rambling takes a psychedelic turn when magic mushrooms are added to the mix and the men lose their minds. (There is a caveat at the beginning of the film warning that it contains rapid strobing that may affect the viewer’s brain. When the fast-edited images of the men’s mushroom-induced hallucinations begin, you can see that the warning is not just a gag.) “A Field in England” will likely appeal to Ben Wheatley fans with its combination of drama, thriller and comedy. But, it is a hard slog for those uninitiated to the director’s unique works. It is sometimes fascinating with its extreme visuals and machine gun editing but too many questions are left unanswered, like: Is O’Neil the Devil incarnate? Maybe.

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Film Review: UNFINISHED BUSINESS
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The Agitation of the Mind: A Film Unfinished (guest review by Aaron)
‎A Film Unfinished (2010) directed by Yael Hersonski • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd
A Film Unfinished
A Film Unfinished

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An unfinished movie

COMMENTS

'A Film Unfinished,' A History Unveiled
The film was conceived, written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, who has artfully blended archival footage taken by German
REVIEW
REVIEW | Manipulating the Past: "A Film Unfinished" ... the stage for a cinematic filtration of Holocaust grief through empirical analysis.
'Film Unfinished' Reveals Nazi Horrors, Manipulation
A Film Unfinished is a provocative and disturbing film about an hour of incomplete Nazi footage shot in the infamous Warsaw ghetto in 1942.
Review: A Film Unfinished
Whereas Nazi films aimed to obscure the dividing line between fact and fiction, A Film Unfinished aims at clarification, at analysis.
Movie review: 'A Film Unfinished'
“A Film Unfinished,” directed by Yael Hersonski, focuses on about an hour of incomplete Nazi footage shot in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto in May
A Film Unfinished
A Film Unfinished presents the raw footage of the latter reel in its entirety, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (including a staged dinner party)
A Film Unfinished
SummaryEdit ... The film re-examines the making of an unfinished 1942 German propaganda film (titled Das Ghetto, "The Ghetto") depicting the Warsaw Ghetto two
A Film Unfinished
Literally. Discovered in a vault in East Germany after WWII were reels of silent footage filmed by Third Reich cameramen in the Warsaw Ghetto. Interspersed
Yael Hersonski Revisits a Nazi Film of the Warsaw Ghetto
In “A Film Unfinished,” the Israeli director Yael Hersonski embarks on a critical analysis of “Das Ghetto” that is remarkable as much for
A Film Unfinished
This film within a film is an analysis of the artform as propaganda, and while there have been other looks at this subject under the Nazi regime, most recently